ACCOUNTABILITY WORLDWIDE (or "How I Learned How To Be Less Of An Asshole And Appreciate The Call-Out")

Back in March, an Instagram page called Cleveland Callouts went up. The first post was about me, followed by some posts from people writing in –also about me. The first post had more specified accusations than any of the follow-up posts –not all of which were about me.

Some of the things said, I was wracking my brain, not only what they were about, but who they were about. Once I learned who it was, I was like, “oh(?)”

For reasons of decorum, decency and also legality if I’m being honest, I'm not going to get into confirming, denying or whatever with the things said on that page. If you would like to contact me personally about those things, maybe I’ll talk to you about it and maybe I won’t. It’s really between them and me at the end of the day.

I believe three other people wrote into the page about me and their messages were posted –anonymously.

One of the people who wrote I spoke to through a third party and have spoken to in person since then multiple times and I think we’re as okay as we’re going to be? Another I recently reached out to and we’re also at a sort of understanding

My understanding is that somebody else that wrote in about me eventually got called out themselves and I hope that they're doing okay because I can only speak from my perspective, but you know, being called a rapist is a wild fuckin’ thing. Walking around and seeing people you know and thinking they’re thinking “oh, someone called that guy rapist online”, it's a heavy thing to deal with.

Yeah. So, this is going to be a serious episode and even more psychotically, and I apologize for this, it is going to be a solo episode. I don't want to involve my co-host or other friends in this until I can see how this shakes out because he and they don't deserve whatever blowback from my affairs. I don’t want to drag them down.

So this is me, Alex Kellar speaking, nobody else.

I remember the day it happened. I had just paid rent and I was walking home in a pretty good mood. If anything, I think I was actually about to post on an Instagram story that Discount Drug Mart had Mavericks on sale. They were like cheaper than usual, like sub-$7, itching toward six bucks which for Cuyahoga County is pretty good.

Pretty good.

Anyway, I got a text from someone that was like “hey, man, are you OK?” and I was like “yeah, why?”

I said something like, “oh, did so-and-so or someone see me on Grindr?” because, I'd just been on Grindr the other day I think, actually using my picture for my profile too, which for me is a wild step.

Anyway, they were like, “yeah, shit man, let me show you this.”

And they sent me the screen grabs.

I was shocked. And then I went home. And made a lot of phone calls. A lot of things happened very fast and now almost six months later talking about it, it’s wild. It's like it was yesterday, but also a million years ago.

I talked to my roommates and with their permission, I sent out an initial message on my Instagram story, while also sharing the initial post from the Cleveland Callouts account about me.

This is what I shared:

“I never claimed to be a perfect person, and it would appear that I was much less than that.

Until the mid-, or hell, late-2010s I very wrongly subscribed to the ‘two drunks make it alright’ policy. That is to say I had a lot of drunken sex which is not OK.

I've had relationships that didn't end well and on and on.

The fact that I do not recall the allegations against me does not negate that they are all too real to the person calling me out, which as far as I'm concerned makes them real.

I'm sick to my stomach and disgusted with myself.

In 2020, after the Matt Barnum callouts came out, I asked anyone I may have wronged to come forward so I could make it right, and I reached out to others that I felt I might have mistreated.

I'm not going to ask the same of whoever made these posts about me as they felt they were necessary and that is their right, but if I can make it better I would like to.

People can change and I feel I have in the last few years, but I can always be and do better.

Thank you and I'm sorry.”

The message continues:

“Working security at the Beachland Ballroom and the Grog shop are my primary income at the moment, and I work at these jobs completely sober, with an eye for protecting vulnerable people.

If either establishment doesn't want me anymore, I completely understand and even applaud them for taking more proactive steps in keeping our community safe.”

I’ll note that when the IG page went up, they threw their callout post in their Instagram story and at the end of it they had tagged the Grog Shop, the Beachland Ballroom and Absolute Intense Wrestling.

I had already been in touch with people from AIW, and also incidentally, I had not worked for AIW since 2020. I had been around at some shows, but I had not been a paid wrestler or on-air talent since the beginning of 2020. I was halfway out the door on active wrestling anyway most likely but that’s another story for another day.

But yeah, they had tagged the Grog Shop and the Beachland Ballroom, which I was occasionally working security for. One thing I've like learned in accountability is, you look at what people’s asks are, and with this call out page, there really weren't any asks. I guess that in tagging AIW, the Beachland and the Grog Shop, they were asking that I not be employed in those places anymore and that ask was answered. I completely understood and I’m still happy those venues did what they did.

Now obviously on like a macro level, there have been people in the past that got a pass much longer after call outs occurred than I did, and if you want to look at like sort of, I don't know, the social economy of it, I guess, yeah, dumping a security guard versus dumping some guy running a thrift shop and dance nights and everything… one’s making you more money than the other, so it would make sense that you know they protected the one longer than the other.

But incidentally, that whole thing has allowed me to get off of this fucking spiraling hamster wheel of pretending I had a job because guess what? If you work at security at a club, that's not a job --I mean, if you could somehow do it like 5-6 nights a week, there's a job, but if you're only doing it like two or three nights a week, that's a gig, a side gig even.

It can trick you into thinking that it's a job if you’re combining it with other side shit, but it’s not a job.

So really, it was healthy for me because guess what else? That shit gave me a lot of stress and anxiety and yeah, jobs that do that aren't great and they wear you down, but yeah, that's neither here nor there.

So yeah, basically the page’s asks were for me to be fired or have ties cut and to let whoever read it know that I was a rapist –an accused rapist.

It was such a fucking blur.

One friend took me out to dinner and we had a really good talk the day this happened and I'm very thankful to her.

Another friend took me under her wing for about 2 days, fed me edibles, let me cry, and turned me on to an online accountability course. She was really there for me and I owe her much. I owe a lot of people a lot.

I had another friend call me over to his house and we had a whole discussion and he tried to veer it into some chance to rail on about and against cancel culture or this or that and I was like, “alright, calm down. Let's just chill the fuck out here--”

That's what the weird thing with this is: people’s reactions to it. Like, privately I received a lot of support from a lot of people and I'm I'm happy that it was private for two reasons:

1. I didn't want it to turn into some giant flame war that was outside of my control.

2. I did not want it to harm whoever had made or wrote into that page, obviously enough harm had been done at some point.

I said it at the time and I still mean it: whatever support I got, I hope they got three times as much support.

Another weird thing, I had multiple people telling me that I should lawyer up. I was like, “what in the fuck am I lawyering up for? I am a high school dropout. Shit, in a good year, I make maybe $22,000. I'm in some bands that barely play and don't make any fucking money and likely never will. I have a podcast that makes me very, very, very little money. So what exactly am I suing for? What the fuck am I actually defending here other than my name? I'm not going to prison for any of this, so what the fuck?

So yeah, I definitely had to set some people straight, but I appreciated them reaching out all the same.

But one friend in particular, she took me into her home and gave me edibles, let me cry, and I thought long and hard of the last 10+ years of my life, trying to remember every single interaction I've ever had with any person ever. At the end of it, I think I came up with about two or three people that I would like to attempt to reach out to one day.

Initially I was really charged up to try to reach out to these people, but I talked to somebody that's been through AA and several other things, and the thing about reaching out to people to make amends is you don't want to rip a scab off that someone’s healed over for your own edification and whatnot.

So by all means, if somebody hears about me and hears about this and they want to talk, I'm right here. If they don’t, I will continue to be right over here.

I don’t want to go on some My Name Is Earl, High Fidelity, 21st century sit-com shit where I'm going around and being like, “hey, I think I did something fucked up. Uh, can you please, you know, can we talk through this so Me/I can feel like a good person?”

I read a few books, believe it or not, and I found out about this interesting thing called the Pods System for dealing with disputes and situations of harm and such.

It's very easy but very complex at the same time, but basically:

Say you have Person A and Person B.

Person A has harmed or done something otherwise fucked up to person B.

Well, everyone should have two different pods.

One pod for when they've done harm and another pod for when they have been harmed, one for someone that has done wrong, one that's been wronged.

The one pod for when you’ve done harm, obviously you want people who are going to be supportive but not overly supportive, but they're also not going to be so disgusted with you that they'd never want anything to do with you again.

And then for the other pod, for when you've been harmed, you want someone that's very supportive obviously, someone that’s going to go to bat for you, etc etc

Each pod consists of two or three friends.

So PERSON A talks to their pod, PERSON B talks to their pod.

After that, the pods get together and talk amongst themselves about how both parties are feeling and what they want and what they can do, all that. After this the pods go back to their respective people and let them know what everyone’s deal is, give or take. And everything seems like, you know, they've sort of like come to some sort of understanding, then everyone comes together and you can have some sort of reconciliation or resolution or some sort of closure to the situation.

I'll put the links for the article and the podcast about the Pods System in the episode notes.

Something they point out is that in our capitalist hell times, we're all busy as fuck and trying to do shit like this is very difficult.

We barely have enough time in between having to work and survive, let alone healing practices and all that. This is kind of all alien to a lot of us and you know, who has the fucking time?

Theoretically we gotta try to make the time, but anyway...

The page went up on a Wednesday and luckily enough on Friday I had my first appointment with my psychiatrist scheduled and shouts out to that psychiatrist! She put me on Clonidine, Prozac and eventually Wellbutrin. Apparently it's the same split my mother has, which is one more thing to be mad at my mom about, she gave me this bad goddamn brain --I kid, love you Mom. But yeah, without those drugs –and those two days on edible care-- I would not have made it past that week, let alone be here today.

When I got home I came to the decision to drop another Instagram post using the much-maligned Notes App. This was the message:

“I'm not the monster some make me out to be, but I'm not the good person others tell me I am. I'm somewhere in the middle and I can and must do and be better. That said, I can't do that growth or work among you all. I’ve caused harm and made others feel unsafe and as such I will not enter or perform in any bars, venues, or community spaces going forward until people feel I've changed and made things right. That could be months, years or the rest of my life.

As far as I'm concerned, I had my last alcohol ever somewhere around 2:00 AM on February 27th, 2022. I'm entering into an accountability course in order to better understand how to make things right with those wronged. As I said earlier, this could take months, years, or the rest of my life. Nothing is promised to us, least of all membership in local arts communities, especially ones attempting to stand for safety and justice for all.

I'd already entered into a mental health care plan a month ago to deal with a lot of things that need dealt with, and rest assured I'll be focusing on this. I'll be deactivating my Instagram within 24 hours as well so as to further remove myself from the public space so that others can heal and feel safe.

I am so sorry to have let so many of you down.”

I let that sit up for just shy of 24 hours. After seeing enough people had faved it or whatever, I felt enough people had seen it. Hell, I'm sure some people maybe screengrabbed it and roasted or toasted it in whatever texts or group chats. But yeah, then I deactivated ye olde Instagram.

Initially I hit delete but then after about 20 days I was like, “Wait, I have fuckin’ 10-plus years of stuff on there. With dead people” --and we'll get to dead people in a bit.

I have to say, I’m pretty grateful to be off of Instagram because Instagram --even before it had a page calling me a rapist-- was a hellhole and had been a hellhole for a long time.

Between 2020 and like the shutdown and everything… You know, they talk about FOMO, fear of missing out. I think We should also add ROGO to the lexicon, and that’s Resentment Of Goings-On. I won’t speak for everyone, but I was holed up in my apartment, judging people for being out at bars or drinking at each other's places, going camping or whatever the fuck. It was a bubble of resentment I was in, furthered by not seeing people in the real world and remembering what I liked about them, not just festering in my mind based on whatever presentation of themselves they gave online. This was difficult even after the world “returned to normal” in 2021ish.

Still, without Instagram, this amazing mystery has returned to my life, where I can't assume to know what's going on with my friends and my acquaintances. I have to either talk to them, or I have to talk to other people about them or, you know, talk to them about other people. I can't know or presume to know what's going on with someone.

Because yeah, that ROGO is real and the FOMO is real, but guess what? Life can and does move on, regardless of whether you subject yourself to some media or don't. It's true. And that's a lesson I've learned.

As far as Twitter, it's funny because I had done it For Real February before All This happened. I had taken the Twitter app off of my phone and strictly browsed and posted from my laptop in order to lower my Twitter usage and that was alright. Of course I picked the shortest month of the year to do this but what can I say? I’m weak.

I returned to Twitter all regular-like in March but that was only for about 3 days or so, 3 to 5 days.

After everything happened I took my account back to private at one point. Shortly after that I changed my changed my @ slightly so I wouldn’t be as easy to search out or anything like that. I never did the standard blacked-out profile pic of shame, I think I changed it to a close-up of my breakfast ramen or some other hell-food. I just wanted to be left alone and I left it alone and eventually I near-completely left.

I went like a good solid month without liking anything. I did like one thing and a friend did yell at me and say, “dude, just start an alt” so I eventually did that. So yeah, there's an alt of mine out there, maybe you've encountered them? I gotta say, anonymous posting and replying feel real nice, never knew I missed it. Much less stress, lower stakes.

Another thing I did, and I don't really know what my rationale was, but after going private again and scrambling my @, I softblocked roughly 800 accounts from following me. A lot of those were old, dead accounts, random wrestling accounts, this or that.

I think I kept most of the people that I would want still following me. A few people softblocked, or unfollowed me or straight-up blocked me and I 100% understand that. You see some bad shit about someone online and you do the mental math of “do I still fuck with this person” and you dip. I’ve done it, everyone’s done it. Why engage with more hopeless and heartless shit then you have to? I know I don’t wanna, and I’m happy to have less in my life.

Anyway, I went from 1700ish followers to 900-something and that’s fine. @TheTowerSkin is where I post pictures of Pedro and maybe share a Spotify playlist here and there. Maybe one day I’ll return proper, maybe I won’t, who cares?

One thing I did that I felt a bit icky about, was on the first Friday of April, which was a Bandcamp Friday, I unlocked my Twitter account to hype the new Ratfucker music we had just finished. Money was a motivating factor in this as I was very broke and the $80 or so bucks I made helped (Ratfucker, I owe y’all like $60, sorry). I didn’t feel great about the whole deal and incidentally it was April Fool’s Day so I deleted the posts at the end of the day and went back to silence.

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about call-outs or cancel culture or whatever the hell, but I'm here to say that I am honestly grateful for mine, and very privileged that it happened at this point in my life. If it had happened say five years ago, I would have been neck deep in wrestling and music and this and that and I would have had something to defend. I would be hiding from it or I would be denying it or ignoring it or trying to quiet it up because I would have had something to guard, something I thought I cared about. Really, I was just making myself insane.

If it had happened 10 years ago, holy shit that could’ve been ugly. Full nuclear flame war from hell.

It would have been real ugly and. I'm very glad it didn't happen 10 years ago, I would have been a prick and not ready. The closest I came was maybe 12 or 13 years ago with the infamous Beef Tacos thread on the thankfully dead Cleveland Hardcore Worldgoo message board, but that was more a community effort with phenomenal posting from all involved which ultimately solved nothing but I think we all had a good time and if you didn’t, I apologize and please: take solace in the fact that you probably make more money than me and aren’t figuring out how to be a human being at age 38.

Back to the call-out though…

I'm at times like an extreme and unbalanced person, so why shouldn't it follow that the thing to wake me up and stop me or my bullshit would also be out-sized and unsubtle. That's what it takes. That's what it took. At like the end of 2019 I was already thinking about calming down in a lot of regards, and I was trying to take some steps. I mean, I was also trying to take some steps in 2018, but at the end of 2019 I definitely saw some sort of a light at the end of the tunnel where I had to start fixing things.

Then the pandemic happened and that woke me up to, “holy shit, you know a lot of my drinking and a lot of my misery comes from being out at bars in bar culture and being around a bunch of people that I often don't want to be around.”

Now I of course, being the fucked person I am, took that to a wild extreme. I became a bit of a weird hermit, which I think the interior decor in my apartment would attest to.

But yeah, the external force that was 2020 was a wall I hit, everyone did. While dealing with this wall, I had time to think about how to go forward. Now where things got confused was in 2021. I started trying to act like things were back to normal, but it really never fit or took. I couldn’t return to how I was.

It used to be that me going out to a bar, I rolled a 20-sided die and if I rolled D20, that was going to be a bad night out. After 2020 and going into 2021 it was more of a 6-sided die and if I rolled 6 that was a bad night out. Towards the end of 2021 and rolling into 2022 it was honestly turning into a coin toss and that's not fun. That's not fun for me. That’s not fun for anyone. That fucking sucks.

So drinking had to go. I had already been planning on quitting drinking after Now That's Class changed hands and became No Class in early March. Now That's Class had always been the one bar where I ever felt truly comfortable in and really enjoyed. I don't know, just like something in my brain was like “yeah, this is this is where I fit.”

I knew it wasn't going to be the same, and that's fine because things have to change, but guess what? I would have to change, too.

Just as the pandemic hit me and hit a lot of people, we all had some reflection to do. There were a lot of homie checks, seeing who would do what and how, etc etc.

So too when this call out hit, that was an additional time for reflection for me and a lot of friends. No one died this time, so that’s cool.

Now, I’d like to think I'm a better person on the other side of this. I had already signed up for a new therapy and medicine regime, for the first time since 2018 when I stopped after having to cancel an appointment when my brother overdosed in Milwaukee. It most certainly would have been better if I had kept up on it, but hindsight is often 20/20 and life gets in the way, yada yada.

At the beginning of 2022 I was increasingly getting these really bad anxiety attacks where I was quitting jobs, freaking out in other situations, I mean, even in 2020 I basically had a drunken anxiety attack/episode which led to me quitting Now That's Class for a good solid 6-7 months. I never worked there again, but I eventually came back as a patron and performer. I will say that I was an asshole in the process of quitting that night, I eventually said many correct things to the person I was actually mad at but was also a prick to two other people who didn’t deserve it, and I feel bad for that. I mended fences with two of the people and I don’t expect the other to ever really forgive me, and that’s fine.

Unrelated sidebar: back in June, about three months into my hopefully lifetime away from booze, I woke up from some dream and had the thought “straight edge is a spectrum and I’m on it.” I mean if ever there were a social construct, surely it’s the Straight Edge, right? My brain further followed to a thought that bar owners are kind of like the landlords of nightlife and culture, so bartenders are kind of like the property managers… yeah, I’ll need some more time with that one most likely.

Getting back on track, I think anyone who likes me should be grateful to the call-out because it accomplished what I and a lot of my friends –through no fault of theirs-- could do. I needed a smack to get me over the edge to fixing myself. Everyone is often very polite and loving, and maybe too much so.

Take how I moved into my current apartment. Back in 2014, I had a situation at a place I was living at with my ex-girlfriend and some friends and then immediately my friends who were living in my current apartment at the time, they had a room open and they took me in and now in hindsight I'm like “you know what? Maybe you people should have told me. ‘Yo, go live with your dad in Milwaukee or go live with your mom in California or something for a while. Get out of Cleveland for a bit. Obviously some things here are not jiving with you right, just go clear head for three, six months, a year or something. You don't need to be here right now, and you're not going to accomplish anything being here.’”

Once again, hindsight is in fact 20/20, so who knows. Everyone’s busy and has 10,000 things to worry about.

I know I heard a story one time of someone in the Pittsburgh punk scene who was having increasingly manic episodes and also abusing drugs on top of it. More on they were doing more sinister and weird, increasingly fucked things until finally someone basically packed their bag and put them on a bus to their parents like and called the person’s parents and were like “Yeah, you're leaving town, get help.”

I'm not saying I needed to be ridden out on a rail but after that incident in 2014, I was beating myself up a lot for it. It was like the first time anything like that had ever happened with me –it should be noted, the last time something like that specifically happened with me. But enough people said “you know what, dude? Shit happens. Life goes on.”

Enough people said that to me that I thought “yeah, sure.” But the thing is, sometimes life doesn't move on. Like obviously life moved on, it moves on even if you’re dead, it’ll move on for a good long while, but I know for that person, that event stuck with them. I hope they’ve moved on from there now, I’m sure it still pops up here and there, that’s how these things work, and I'm sorry for that and for my part in that.

But hopefully there are lessons we can all learn from this, or most importantly for me, lessons I can learn and put into practice going forward.

A few months ago I dipped my toe into attending a show at a venue in town. It wasn’t a show where anyone from my usual scene would be around but it was something I wouldn’t mind seeing so I went. Just about everyone at the venue were happy to see me, and if they weren’t then they hid it well. I drank three N/A beers and found it scratched the same social itch as normal beers (and the fuckers were non-alcoholic IPAs to boot, so they hurt my wallet just like old times, though truth be told two of them were bought for me).

I've also been out to restaurants and people have either been polite or even said, “hey, nice to see you, Kellar.”

Often times I’m taken aback and don’t know what to say. A lot of old friends have checked in and I’ve appreciated that. A really weird thing, some previous sexual partners and people I’ve had flings with from way back have reached out to me and checked up and in. Saying things like “I know you're a better person than this, Kellar” and to all them I say: thank you.

But once again, I do want to thank the person that called me out, because that was the only thing that was going to really stop me.

This whole period has been very humbling. It goes without saying, but I'll say it.

I am privileged for this to be happening at this point in my life, straight up.

So after losing those two security jobs I got a job as a pizza delivery driver. I was a little paranoid about the off-chance that someone might see me delivering pizza for X or Y place and might call in and say “oh, you have a rapist delivering pizza?” or something. That paranoia bore no fruit as within two days of working at this job my car died for good on Saint Patrick's Day, of all the fuckin’ days.

They offered me a job working inside, but… I had been really calm about everything to a point, which was an interesting thing, especially for me.

Towards the end of me being on Instagram, in the days between the call-out post my deactivation, I had gained something like 50 followers. They kept on following and following and following me and I was kind of aghast. Thinking “what are you people following me for? Are you fans of accused rapists? What's happening?”

One possible explanation was they wanted to watch me melt down or blow up or like, get on the ground floor of some misery and flailing. Car crash shit. As it was, I never had that public meltdown.

I had like cried the first couple of days after the call-out for a variety of reasons, but I didn’t truly melt down or despair until my car died for good --I mean, if you don't live in Cleveland, it's a sprawled out nightmare.

Luckily I'm in a spot where I have almost everything I need within a 1.4 mile radius of me, and often more like 1/2 mile radius, so it's not so bad. I’ve figured out the bus for most things I can’t hoof if I can’t get a ride, and walking’s been pretty tight anyway. I stare at clouds a lot, you can’t really do that proper while driving. Come winter, trust me I'll be a little more pissed about it, but hey. When I lost my car though, I suddenly felt very exposed. Someone could run me over with their car, take out Alex Kellar, accused rapist. Or they could chase me down and beat me up. My mind reeled. Thankfully the medication reeled a lot of those thoughts back in.

The drugs have helped a lot with that because it used to be that I would catastraphize like it was my job. My mind would create these swirling, spiraling, thought patterns of negativity and conspiracy and hopelessness until I was either foaming in the mouth and mind with rage or a wrecked puddle in the fetal position. A lot of times it was the fetal position, but every once in a while it was an explosion. Regardless, whether or not the shit was real or not, what the hell am I gonna to do about it? What are you?

That's a great question to ask yourself if you find yourself conspiracizing, you know? Alright, great, this conspiracy exists. What the fuck are you going to do about it? What can you do? As an individual, probably not a lot, but I don’t know.

Living with an itching fear that someone at work is going to scream “YOU’RE A RAPIST” at me is a wild and at times terrifying thing, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen. At the end of the day, all sorts of people get away with shit their whole lives and never have this fear, and have done much worse than anything I’ve done or been accused of. Maybe there's some kind of cosmic balance in there, who knows? I’ll take it, real or imagined, because what else am I going to do?

Sure, I could move to some new place and start over, but realistically all it would take is some sort of social media post saying “Alex Kellar's in the area and etc, etc” and then a bunch of people who I have zero goodwill or history built up with would write me off or run me out of town. So I guess I'll just ride out the dirty looks and bad vibes I encounter time to time, loser that I am, and see if I can't do all right and be better than I have been for the rest of my life.

I don't know, one day months back I had a negative thought pattern within me, which I've told to shut the FUCK up because it's not like I was going to do anything really with my life other than what I was doing anyway, but the thought was “what's the point of trying to make anything of the rest of my life, like, going to school, doing this or doing that, if someone can Google my name or Twitter search my name or whatever the hell and see, ‘oh, they're accused of rape, it's done with this guy.’”

And that's stupid because you know what? Who the fuck cares? I was not going to do much more with my life than what I was anyway so who really cares? I'm a fucking loser. And that also doesn’t matter because I can't change anything I did or didn't do. I can only try to change what I'm going to do and not do to the best of my ability and that's how I'm going to live going forward. I’m not a predator. I’m a fuck-up and I'm working on it.

I want to reiterate that I do admire and appreciate the courage it took to call me out. As mentioned before, at different times in my life I would have very likely handled it differently, and not in a good way, so there was definitely some courage at play in making the call-out.

When it hit, my social capital was at a near all-time low. Some would even say that I was “old, ugly, and irrelevant” and you know, if the shoe fits? I’m gonna see about getting a new pair of shoes, comfort be damned.

But yeah, when my call-out happened it was great timing. I had nothing to really lose so I could engage with it without the great fear which others might carry which could lead to uglier results.

Now to the point about call-outs and you know “canceling” or whatever you want to call it, some people say these things only have as much power as you grant them and that you can ignore it and no-sell it and it'll go away. That might be true, but I'd feel like a serious piece of shit doing that.

In 2020 there was a local musician that was called out. Numerous times. There was an entire account dedicated to women sharing their stories about him, stories spanning 10+ years. The page was called Surviving Matt Barnum. I felt awful about it because about 10 years prior, I had been one of the people who platformed him and his band after some different sketchy shit went down with a different member. That band member was beat up at a show and like absolute idiots we all thought “justice was done” and sort of went back to booking the band.

I made a post trying to own my bit of responsibility for everything and also asked for anyone who felt wronged by me at all to come forward. I reached out to other people who I thought I might need to apologize to. When I did this, I knew some chickens might come home to roost for me as I had been a maniac drunk and wild hoe for years at this point, often at the same time. Not great, I know.

Around this time there was an attempt at mediation between me and a former partner. It stalled out after a certain point because I wasn’t comfortable discussing some things with a child running around (because yes, there was a child running around). I still appreciate the attempt made by the mediator and former partner.

Anyway, while all this was going on, I was trying to think. Thinking about how we can punish or exile people who do wrong, but how do we prevent these things from happening going forward? At that point in 2020, there were no shows happening, nothing was going on. So my thought process was maybe we could get something going on an educational level where say someone comes up with a 60 minute, 45 minute, 90 minute seminar to go through about best practices for dating, drinking, sex, consent all that. Basic guidelines so that no one could say “I didn’t know, we didn’t know”

In 2020 the iron was hot for this and when I say the iron was hot I mean it was dead cold. No one was touring, nothing was happening, so if we got a bunch of people in the program we could get a lot done, because as soon as everything started moving again, returning to “normal”, things were going to return to the same jumbled ball of shit rolling down the hill.

We had a window there, and my thought was if we got everyone from a bunch of local bands to run through this thing, like if every band on a show had been through this course you could throw a stamp on the flyer indicating that everyone knew the score in a sense. And if it worked locally we could export it to other cities and scenes, yada yada. You could still have your scumbag or old man bands on shows, you just wouldn’t have that stamp on the flyer and people might know to have their guard up a bit more or something. There’d be other mechanisms in place, but I never really got that far in my brainstorming.

I was talking with someone about this and they told me that this was a project that women should be leading, that I should listen to women on this issue. I agreed so I passed the idea onto a friend and allegedly there was maybe a meeting or two and I didn’t really hear much after that. It’s understandable, this is and would be a lot of work and we’re all already working all the fucking time one way or the other.

But yeah, that whole idea was me trying to constructively flail I guess. Because we can't change whatever happened in the past, but we can change how things go going forward, but you're not going to change it with infographics and yelling at people online.

I've had two Venn diagrams flying through my head for months now. In one, there’s a circle with POSTING in it, in the other it says HAVING A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION. Obviously both things can happen at the same time from time to time, but often they are very different things.

The other Venn diagram once again has POSTING in one circle, and then “DOING (THE) WORK” in the other circle. Once again, sometimes both of them are the same thing, often they are not.

None of that is to say that posting is not without its bravery or consideration of risk at times, just that it’s often not as valuable as we would like it to be. Of course you might be thinking “what the fuck is this podcast or essay (depending on how you’re engaging with this) if not a post you dumbshit?” Well, I don’t know what to tell ya there besides this is a really, really long post at the very least.

But yeah, we would all agree that education and enforcement of behavior and practices, as it stands now, all too often doesn't work, but then it's like, do we want to organize a new and alternative system? If organized steps towards community education, mediation and healing aren't taken, then aren’t we all just flailing individually throwing around words like “accountability”?

What is accountability and how often does it boil down to “what have you done for me lately?” For example, calling out someone with lower social capital or *shudder* clout can be safer than calling out someone bigger in the food chain, which is a fair rationale in some ways, and in others not.

I mean, on an ignorant level, looking at accountability, it might indicate some sort of accounting. Taking account. Indicates some sort of mathematics. Indicates some sort of agreed upon rules. There's honest and dishonest accounting, and even that's a question of whether one believes in the project one is taking account for. There are material reasons for moving things around for their benefit and others.

Can you put someone's soul and actions on a spreadsheet? Tally it all up? We used to leave that to God, but even then numbers got fudged.

What I'm saying is there needs to be a system and rules in place for any ability to reasonably account, which is fine. What is it? Have we agreed upon one and are we implementing it fairly? If so, great!

I'm neither arrogant nor naive enough to think that I can ever be forgiven by everyone, that I can make amends for every last thing I've ever done. I was never liked by everyone. Nearly no one is. But in time, I think I can work my way to ambivalence without further spikes of negative uproar.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic right now, but I think I'm basically kind of good? The call-out post didn't ask for anything besides me being fired from my jobs, and that happened. I've over delivered to non-existing demands and I will continue to do.

I've done more good than harm, but I've done more harm than is good. I’m pretty sure I haven't brought as much pain into people's lives as I have joy, and I've even mixed both in the same people. Whom amongst us, you know?

But the fact is, I've liked performing for my for people all my life, hell, I would bring myself into show-and-tell and 1st grade. I'll likely never have kids, and good probably! All I have for any sort of “legacy” is the friendships I've made and art and shit I’ve done. The last 6 months have made me realize how fragile all this is and how much it means to me, as stupid as it all is.

But in discussing accountability, I have done some actual research, believe it or not. I took an online course on the advice of a good friend and I’m very thankful to her for that --it's very good, I’ll be sure to link it somewhere in this behemoth (likely the end?)

But yeah, I’m in therapy, I’m on medication, and I’m 6+ months deep on never ever drinking again.

I’ve had a lot of time and quiet to examine a bunch of things about myself which I will get into later on here. I've mapped a good deal of problems that I've had for a long, long time.

Here’s a quick quote from that online course:

“Accountability means justice, a true promise that it won't happen again. It might look like both sides being heard, but the harmed party being healed. I see accountability in my life when I see results, changed behavior, steps taken to prevent it in the future. It would feel like swapping a weight for a warmth.”

I'm being accountable because I was called out. I was attempting to get off a loser-defined path before I was called out, but this has put a much finer point on the journey. I'm not in any legal trouble, so this is all optional. I could just fade away and or live in the shadows, but I don't want to live with this guilt anymore, and I'd like to show that there's another way to be to think, to act, and to learn.

One thing that has helped me tremendously from the online accountability course is a simple little chart, or an image I suppose. I think it’s a chart. Anyway, It's a circle with a bunch of arrows going around the circle to the right, infinitely. It’s a daily check-in, but I've found it's also a good way to view past events in your life. Inside the circle it asks three questions:

Was it out of alignment with my values?

What was going on with me at the time?

What do I need to do about it now?

“Was it out of alignment with my values” is a very crucial thing to think on, because, going back to earlier when I said I was running around being drunk and/or a hoe for a long time, thinking things like “two drunks make it alright” at the time, I don’t agree with that now but I did back then.

My values have shifted and on top of that I’ve taken alcohol completely out of the picture, as I told my therapist “I’m going to find new and interesting ways to fuck up”

I’m not making excuses. EXPLANATIONS are not excuses, but they can explain things sometimes. I went to health class in the 8th grade in the late 90s. In that class, the long and short of consent “don't drag someone in an alley and rape them”. That seemed easy enough back then, there were no alleys in the suburb I was living in –incidentally I have never dragged anyone in an alleyway and raped them, so maybe Ms. Heath got through to me.

But yeah, that was basically the long and short of it as far as education on consent went in those formative years for me. I can recall more occasions of my parents yelling at me for destroying the family computer with viruses from porn sites than I can constructive sex talks.

If we look back to our parents and grandparents, they probably have a shitload of skeletons in their closets, yet I think (or hope?) we are trending towards better practices as time goes on.

Another interesting thing from the accountability course is something called “centered accountability” because accountability is actually on a spectrum. There's under-accountability and over-accountability --you might think “over-accountability, that can only be a good thing, right?” but you'd be wrong.

Let's get to under-accountability, under-accountability is not taking any or enough accountability for your choices and the consequences of those choices. It features Retaliation which includes harming or punishing or threatening or discouraging a person who is seeking apology, seeking accountability, or amends. Then there is this phrase DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

If that all seems familiar, we've seen it in a million meltdowns online and tirades in person. I've been as guilty of it as anyone.

But then more interesting is over-accountability, which is taking account for too much that isn't yours, taking accountability for literally everything except what the person wants you to take accountability for, reacting very emotionally, apologizing on autopilot without taking time to address the root causes –and that is very crucial one. Over-accountability also involves gesturing and making promises you can't possibly follow through with through meaningful action.

Just as under-accountability features Retaliation, over-accountability has Manipulation, which is doing any of the above consciously and unconsciously too control the outcome or precipitate a specific response.

And yeah, I will 100% cop to over-accountability. Over the years I’ve apologized for being a shithead without taking the steps to stop being a shithead, and when you look at the Notes App posts I made immediately after the call-out, and hell, even this whole thing to an extent, yeah, I’m guilty of over-accountability –though to be fair, I have no real idea how this will be received, I’m hoping for a mellow shitstorm but people can take it however they like and I will accept and deal with that.

But now the question is, what is centered accountability?

More from the class:

“Centered accountability does not equal perfect accountability. Perfect accountability does not exist. It's not a real place. People might pass through it, but no one lives there. The idea of perfection sets us up to fail and give up before even trying. Often meeting the requests of the person harmed does not require being ‘perfect’.”

So like all things, it's not on some binary. It's not a yes or a no, a wrong or right, a pass or fail. It's on a spectrum. You want to be somewhere in the middle on that, but my big takeaway is, you have to address the roots, and that's mapping which I will get to here in a bit.

It's actually funny. I remember way back in like the mid 2000s when I was a pizza delivery driver. This is pre-smartphone era when you would just have this map back at the pizza shop. It was this laminated map that was on a grid and that was how you figured out directions to deliveries but you didn’t get to take the map with you. The map stayed at the shop.

You could call the shop and someone could try to give you directions, but… I remember this one night I was having an exceptional fucking shit-fit in my van, freaking out, trying to find this goddamned house until finally, I pulled over and screamed long and hard, tears in my eyes, and then as my head swam a bit less from the screaming I fell upon this mantra: “I live on a map, I live on a map, I live on a map, I live on a map”, and eventually that sort of calmed me down and I started seeing the directions inside of my mind by just recognizing that I was currently on a map, on that map, that I wasn’t nowhere, I wasn’t lost.

So just as looking at a map can help you find paths to where you need to go and advise against others, mapping your mind out can help you realize why you’ve done X or Y thing and how not to do the same things again.

So yeah, centered accountability.

You can assume the worst of people or the best of people, sure, but you can also assume the middle of people.

I'm not a predator, I'm an omnivore. So are you. Even vegans eat some bugs in their sleep.

The first two times I ever had sex was with the girl who was my first girlfriend, I was fucked up. We were fucked up. The first time we were on ecstasy, and the second time lots of whiskey. We dated for two weeks, had sex in altered states twice, and that was my introduction to sex with girls socially, like “oh, you're fucked up when you have sex, that’s how it happens, that’s how it is”. That was the logic of the time for me and it took a long while to break away from that.

I've look back on a lot of my different substance abuse issues and obviously I had a bunch of weird social anxiety, fear.

I barely drank at home when the pandemic got into gear. I would have maybe two Bloody Marys once every couple of weeks on a Sunday afternoon, but besides that, nothing. Some people were slamming beers at home and I was like, “nope, I'm good.” Lots of energy drinks, coffee, iced tea, and even some water every once in a while.

Thanks to that once in a generation global pandemic I was able to follow through on a goal I had written down in later 2019 for 2020: doing less than half as much cocaine as I did in 2019.I crushed it, maybe buying and imbibing 2 or 4 grams total –I want to say I bought maybe 2 or 3 grams in 2021, and then half a gram in early 2022, none since. Progress!

A few months ago I had a realization that much of my coke use in my 30s sort of mirrored or subconsciously recreated my late teens and pre-21 year-old relationship with alcohol. It was a forbidden thing that I had to know someone to procure, had to throw down with friends to get and afford, something to share with those without, facilitating some kind of connection. It also helped me maintain 20something drinking habits into my 30s, a “performance”-enhancing drug, if you would. I’m happy to have that behind me, especially with all the fent floating around anymore, jesus.

They say hurt people hurt people, and that's true. It's a cliche, but it's true. Compounding on that, I'm a fucked up person and in turn I know a lot of fucked up people, and who would’ve guessed that fucked up people can do fucked up things to each other, which I guess is just a more cussing version of “hurt people hurt people”.

I’ve had a lot of problems for years, like a fear of commitment that came from a fear of becoming my dad in a way. Fear of the knowledge of the cost of a dream, awareness of alienation, all of that largely scared me off of ever 100% committing to anything or taking anything 100% seriously.

Maybe there are people that take some things 100% seriously and never joke, never fuck around with other things or people and I'm jealous of those people, but I cannot picture it for myself. I've had to be a much more serious-minded person in the last 6 or so months and I’m sincerely looking forward to being an un-serious person again, but a better un-serious person than I’ve been.

One thing I've battled for years is self-hatred, but I came across a wild thought about self-hatred: IT’S BAD. You really can't hate yourself because how often do you help someone that you hate? Heal someone that you hate? You can be mad at yourself, sure, but calm down, you can't hate yourself.

Drinking didn't cause all my problems, but it damn sure made ignoring old ones and barreling into new ones easier. I’d use alcohol and party because I didn't want to deal with things going on with me and it created more problems than I had in the first place. And here we are.

I will say if you’re going through shit and you can arrange it, go get some therapy, get some brain drugs, some medication because holy shit, I wouldn’t have made it through this last period without any of that. I’ll not that medication isn’t a be-all end-all fix, you need the therapy on top, as I figured out from my time on medication in 2018.

But yeah, in the past I’d have a bad thought, like “So-And-So knows where I live, what if they broke into my apartment and killed my cat?” and I’d loop that in my mind along with every corresponding worst-case scenario working myself up and falling down this stairwell into terror and despair and I’d be texting or telling people all this doom if I wasn’t frozen inside my own mind or in the fetal position in bed or running from the bad thoughts by any means available, chasing ever-riskier distractions.

Now on the drugs, I'll have a thought like that and think, “yeah that would be bad, but likely won't happen, moving on!” My imagination was in a dogshit relationship with my paranoia for a long time, now it’s down to a quiet shout, I don’t lose myself and react out of fear. I still get some creeping senses of dread and such here and there, but it’s nothing like it used to be and I can engage with and discard it a lot, lot easier.

Grief is a motherfucker. I've half- and whole-ass apologized to someone I was shitty to while in grief and that will never really be enough. They seem to be doing well now, better than me, and I'm happy for them. I can't ever really right that wrong, I was a prick.

To hearken back to a previous statement, explanations are not excuses, but they can explain some things and that's an important distinction, so I don't know, here are some potential explanations and explorations of the how’s and the why’s and the what’s of why I am and how I’ve been. That doesn't mean that's how I'm going to be, because I think in the last six months and beyond, I've figured a bunch of things out and I can hopefully move forward being better than I’ve been...

Back in the beginning of 2013 I had moved to Philadelphia with the goal of becoming a pro wrestler. At that time, I had a girlfriend back in Cleveland. She'd visited me a few times since I’d moved out, so for Memorial Day weekend, which also fell around my birthday, I came out to hang with her and see friends in Cleveland. She was living in a house with our mutual friend, Joe Korzan (RIP) and some other friends.

Joe was a dear, dear friend. We had lived together in the Tower 2012, played in bands together, had way more ups than downs… we’d been through some shit and I loved him dearly, I still love him dearly.

I’ll note that two years before May of 2013, my friend Mark had died the day after my birthday, on the 30th --RIP Mark Gorney-- and that was the first friend in my lifetime that died suddenly. Mark was 28--I'm 10 years older than he was now, and I don’t feel 10 years wiser though I sometimes suspect I might be, I miss arguing with you, Mark, love you buddy...

Anyway, it was Memorial Day. Monday night. We were all hanging out in the living room, probably around 10:00 o'clock, when Joe came home and began wandering up to his room with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Coca-Cola.

We're like, “hey man, hang out a bit” because he seemed kinda intent on drinking alone in his room and we thought maybe it’d be better if he did that around friends.

There was some conversation while he was ascending the stairs and at one point we asked him if he was okay or something like that and I remember at the end he said “you don't know what I can do with an extension cord!” and we were all like “haha, Joe” because he just had at times a dark and often edgy sort of humor but, I guess we should have known better because he had tried some things in the past at other places, but… but either way, apparently Joe was hurting real bad.

Somewhere around one or two in the morning Joe used the extension cord he alluded to earlier. On the doorknob in his bedroom. He hung himself.

So the following day, the day before my birthday, it's Tuesday, everyone’s back to work. My girlfriend at the time, she knocked at Joe's door because because he hadn’t woken up yet for work. He was a bike messenger.

So she woke me up and said “hey, can you go check on Joe? I’m kind of worried.”

I said “oh goddamnit, fine” and went and knocked and asked for him to wake up and finally opened the door and there he was, tongue out, eyes closed, back arched, belly down, face up, blue skin… 120lb fucker had figured out how to hang himself on a faux-crystal doorknob in a bedroom the size of a lower-tier storage unit.

I immediately ran and took him down and laid him down and maybe I yelled for someone to call 9-11, I really don’t know or remember.

That was fucking horrible. I was not fucking prepared whatsoever to see my friend fucking dead by his own hand first thing when I woke up in the morning.

I was barely prepared for a dead friend two years prior, to see my friend dead in a casket and now I was seeing my friend just fucking dead and I fucking touched him and I pulled him down and it was fucking worthless and yeah, that was fucking horrible.

I remember like just clenching my fist and gritting my teeth when the paramedics and the police showed up, just clenching my fist and like staring straight forward with my mouth shut in some state that wasn't fury or sadness.

I don't know if I thought that was being strong or what the hell it was, but I just remember having my fist clenched and mouth shut and eyes forward and… I was just shut down.

As months followed, I ended up moving back to Cleveland and I moved in with my girlfriend, which should have been nice enough because, I guess it also should be mentioned, that at 29 years old, this was actually my first long term “official” girlfriend since I was 20 and that relationship at 20 lasted about 2 weeks [fun fact: I’m pretty sure that girl broke up with me so she could fuck my now-deceased friend Mark, I never really held it against either of them I don’t think, but who knows, it was a million (18) years ago]

Either way, I moved back and I had completely shut down sexually. I was being emotionally erratic.

On top of all that I was coming off of a year-plus timeout from Now That's Class, which happened when I got into a fight with Paul over money at Horrible Fest back in May of 2012, and that was causing strain in our relationship.

So there were a lot of changes going on, but specifically, everyone was still in some kind of grief, including me, and yeah, I had shut down sexually and I had shut down emotionally in a lot of ways. We didn't realize until way too late that I definitely had a lot of PTSD going on, which has haunted me throughout the years and I’m thankful to be working on and through now in a real way.

We broke up in November of 2013 and proceeded to have an on again/off again, at times contentious, in and out of each other's lives, sort of a relationship in the years that followed. It was obvious to all, including us, that on a romantic and emotional level, we were sort of toxic for each other. It just never worked out. One person wasn't where the other person needed them to be and that was often me. It was never going to work, yet I longed for her in a way that made no real sense, until I realized something about two weeks before the call-out post back in March of this year.

I've loved 3 girls romantically in my life. The first girl, we still talk here and there and fondly regard each other as friends. We had a years-long relationship that never really was besides some flashes here and there, but once she had a couple of kids and I moved about a half-hour east, that just sort of like closed the door on that.

The 2nd girl, we had a months-long undeclared, near-secret sort of affair, but then she got a boyfriend and after some non-communication I talked to them both one night at the bar and wished them well and there was closure there.

What I realized with this girl I couldn’t get over no matter how obvious it was that it would never work was, if Joe hadn't killed himself, me and this girl, maybe we would have dated another four months or maybe we would’ve dated another four years, but it would have ended sooner or later, due to who we were and how we were with each other.

As it was, Joe basically ended it when he ended it, but more specifically than that, the reason I kept on pining for her and longing for her and coming back to wanting her is I didn't want her: I wanted who I was before I saw my friend dead and hanging from a doorknob. I wanted who I was, my esteem in the community, the dreams I had, how I remembered her feeling about me, how I felt about her, I wanted all that back.

I wanted who I was before I saw my friend dead back, and that's what she represented in my mind and as soon as I realized this the longing cut to nearly nothing because I was able to understand why I kept on wanting to come back and make it work.

I didn't want her, I wanted who I was before that fucking horrible thing happened to me.

And that's not her fault at all. I've apologized to her before for different things and I can never fully apologize. Unfortunately, that's just the cards that the universe and my brain and Joe and everyone else dealt, and I’m sorry for my part in that. I apologize for that.

So yeah, basically any relationship that I tried to be in between 2014 and six or seven months ago was near-impossible because I was always going to be longing for this girl. A longing that was completely irrational, but now there's some rationality attached to the longing, and in that I see that that rationality is in fact irrationality.

So now I know, or hope I know, that I can move on. I think I can.

So that's a major realization I had, and a major stumbling block to growth removed.

Because she could come into my life whenever and I would quit just about anyone that I was seeing at the drop of a hat, and that's not great. That's not how you form new relationships and build a life with somebody else, if you're still constantly pining for somebody else.

But now I realized I wasn't really pining for someone else. I was pining for who I was before a fucking terrible thing happened to me --happened to all of us, happened a lot of us who were there, who remember (I still hear his laugh sometimes).

One of the warning signs that my drinking was getting the better of me in the last year or so was… it used to be that I had more of a calendar brain where around the month of May, I was kind of crazier than usual. I’d have a lot of thoughts going back to Joe, and this was happening back in like February of 2022, I was having Joe thoughts, and that's way too early. So yeah, there was some shit I had to work out, but either way.

I’m happy to report that May of 2022 was the first incident-free May I’ve had in about a decade.

Another thing that has plagued me throughout relationships and that is, I can blow up the FUCK up via text. I'll do this not only in romantic relationships, but also in platonic friendships, creative settings, all over.

Some wrestlers will remember a certain group chat where I exploded on another wrestler for not doing what I felt was necessary or adequate with regard to ring crew. Now I feel like a fucking shithead about it, least of all because one of the more tenured wrestlers --who was and is in fact a cruel, little shithead-- loved that fucking message and gassed me up about it. I doubt the wrestler I blew up on is reading or listening to this, but sorry again, brother.

But yeah, when I'd get into an argument with a partner or whoever, I would have the habit of just leaving paragraphs on paragraphs, and there would be a lot of strong points in there, but just made in the most dickheaded way possible with like all sorts of reaching and invective and spite.

At the end of the day I'm 6’1”, 200+ pounds, and I look the way I do, so I understand that there can be connotation and implication beyond words, and that's on me and that's fucked.

Like, a year or so ago I turned this venom on Michael Strenk and a group chat where I blew the fuck up on him out of nowhere. He was just questioning some light thing I said and I exploded on him, got really personal and I was a fucking asshole.

That event there kind of gave me pause, but when I figured out where it was coming from was when I finally did this to my mom.

I was drunk and depressed and in some argument with her and I said some things I had been wanting to say for 10 or 15+ years and while I made valid points from my end, I also said them in the shittiest way possible. Not at the right time, not in the right place, not in the right headspace.

She said “text me when you're sober and see how much of this you agree with.”

And I did look at it the next day, hungover, and told her “yeah, I agree with everything I said. I'm sorry I was a dick but yeah, I needed to say that shit.” We didn’t talk for a few months after that.

But thinking back on that, I realized that a lot of my text bombing was me wanting to say some things to my mom and never saying it and then just saying it indirectly to everybody else.

I actually texted an ex recently, I had just seen a tweet that said “women friendzone men, but men momzone women” and was like “yeah hey, sorry for that”

So since this realization I haven’t had a text tantrum since. Now, I might be under less stress or I might be trying to be on my best behavior given the circumstances I’m in, but really it’s something that I can see myself catching myself doing going forward and nipping in the bud, especially without alcohol in the picture.

But yeah, I just needed to address some things with my mother for a long time and I finally did it. I finally addressed that anger with her, and now I can move forward and be a much more healthy person.

So here’s some advice I guess, if you have some shit to say to your parents, just try to say it or you're going to end up crazy and taking that shit out on people that don’t deserve it and won’t understand it anyway and that’s only going to fuck you up further in the end.

I remember at one point in, I want to say 2013 or early 2014, I was in an argument with my girlfriend or ex-girlfriend at the time and I was drunk, I went to bed. We had switched to having separate bedrooms before we had broken up because she thought that might help us, I don’t know, it was on the advice of a bartender she knew who was and still is in a fantastic relationship. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Anyway, I was at this point living in the room that Joe killed himself in, spending many a night staring at that fucking doorknob. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been in there, but we didn't fucking know, we just didn’t. Looking back, I remember some people being icked out that we were still living in the house, period, but it’s like, were we supposed to magically materialize a security deposit and first-months rent for some other place or places? Jesus, the amount of people staying in bad situations because they can’t afford to change or lose their housing, what the fuck, disgusting, but I digress...

We didn't know.

But yeah, so apparently after this fight I had went to bed but at some point I had thrown this framed photo of my mom and me into the hallway, smashed it to pieces. The next she asked, “why did you do that?”

And I said “I don't know” and didn't examine it. I wasn’t examining shit, nothing.

So yeah, for Christ’s sake, if you go through some traumatic shit, go get help. Get work done. Do work. Immediately. Do not bottle that shit up.

My family had a weird bottled-up way about us, where we would not say what the hell was really bothering us about each other besides maybe once or twice a year where we would all have a torrential evening of exploding on each other, usually set off by one small thing that would rocket to shitstorm status. We’d address every last thing without really addressing anything, air blasting out of a punctured rage balloon. That's not a healthy way to live or relate to people you care about.

You have to address things as they come and be real and forward with people with how you feel and how they're making you feel, which is difficult as hell. It's very difficult, but that's something you have to do or else you're going to snap or wither up and it's not good.

So thinking on other things and, I think a lot of my sexual mania over the years was me looking for brain chemicals that are largely gotten now through the drugs. My dick is a near-non-entity, I’ll go days without thinking about it, though every once in a while the Welbutrin will have me acting up for a day or so, but that “acting up” is jerking off once or twice instead of going into weird porn/Grindr rampages or further years back hoeing around and inevitably breaking hearts and stressing myself out.

I have a sense of calm now, sort of a walking post-post-nut clarity state. I still find people attractive or interesting, but urge and fire to fuck and find out isn't there like it used to be. Increasingly, I’m looking for someone to smoke weed and walk and eat and watch TV and bitch about things and people with –and maybe that’s just getting older, I don’t know, but I feel like the brain drugs and contemplation have also brought me here.

I remember having this intense curiosity over what X or Y girl looked like naked, not even to have sex, but to see what was happening under the clothes, and now I’m thinking there was possibly some dysphoria going on there, but I haven’t examined that anywhere near enough yet to really comment.

But yeah, throughout the years I've like always been more existing in the present, not living in it. The grass is always greener or the past was always nearer and fuck, now I'm very much examining the past, living in the present, and thinking about the future, which is good.

I've gone through periods over the years where I’ve realized it, but more and more I've been bitter with the concept of masculinity, and certainly bitter with the concept of my own masculinity, much in the same way that I've found myself bitter with music in the past, if that makes sense. I don’t know.

I read bell hooks’ book “The Will To Change” and, holy shit, that thing should be required reading for EVERYONE. Men, women, gentle-thems, whoever the fuck, and apologies to bell hooks for saying “fuck” all the time because she says that “fuck” is like, you know, just inherently a violent word. I've been more cognizant of it and I've been trying to say it less but I’m sorry bell, it’s a solid placeholder for a lot of speech tics and feelings with me, but I’ll try.

A lot of things in “The Will To Change” are common sense, while not yet common sense, like it was like opening a door to a place I always vaguely knew existed but hadn’t heard someone else say.

A lot of the conceit is that, obviously patriarchy is crushing all of us. Obviously, it's crushing women. But it's also crushing men in the sense that, you know, we have like all these bullshit standards and ideas of patriarchy and masculinity to live up to which are soul-killing and heart-destroying. But women are also married to the patriarchy, whether they acknowledge it or not. We need to raise men to be more in touch with their feelings, emotions, this and that, but women also have to be ready to listen to and engage with those feelings and emotions without being dismissive, and I know that can be a pain in the ass because men are often troglodytes in that regard. So its a two-way street, and it’s hell as everything is.

My one contention with the book is that it was very much written in 2004 and rides a very hard gender binary that I think is fading in some ways these days, at least more so than it was in 2004. Another question I had based on that was: does the gender binary inform the patriarchy or does the patriarchy inform the gender binary? I don’t know, but it also had some interesting things to say about dominator culture and how as long as one group dominates the other no one will be happy/free, etc… it’s a great book, 11 chapters, 188 pages, easy-ish read, check it out, I’ll loan it to ya, DO IT.

I’ve carried a lot of guilt and shame with me --earned and unearned, real and imagined-- for a long time. One thought I had recently, is that when you feel guilt and shame for Everything, it's hard to feel guilt and shame for the Correct Things.

After Joe died, I was feeling guilt for so many things, like for example, the Tower 2012 going under. The Tower was a DIY space we were all living in. It had existed from 2006 to 2012, I spent 3 and a half non-consecutive years there from 2008 to the end in December of 2012 (not December 21st either, the Mayans missed their mark there, or maybe we let them down).

Once I said I was going to move to Philly to pursue this wrestling school thing, everyone decided they were going to move out, too. I guess maybe I was the one that was dealing with the landlord, but really other people were too so I’m not sure why my leaving would pull the pin out of the grenade but I guess it did.

Really, it was something that had to happen, it had devolved into a bad boys ranch, Peter Pan from hell shit. It was fun, but it was fucked, and none of us were going to grow staying there. We had to spread our wings and fly free of the place, out in the “real” world. I thought for a long time that some people were not ready to spread their wings and fly free, and that killed them, or almost killed them.

There are other people that bounced around and had issues finding themselves in their lives and there have been some massive and fucked bumps in that road, but I think most of us, a lot of us made it out alright. It was something that had to happen.

I was carrying a lot of guilt for all that.

And then, you add in all sorts of other guilt and shame, liberal guilt, white guilt, this guilt, that guilt, closeted shit, but if you operate on a blanket level of feeling guilty for everything, then what the hell are you ever actually going to do about Any of it? What are you going to do? Feeling guilty for everything is a cop-out, so knock that shit off. You 100% should feel shame and you should feel guilt for some things. But you cannot, CAN NOT, no human can feel guilt and shame for all things, all the time. That is not how you fix things. There isn’t some guilt and shame meter filling up, and once it hits 100 you’ve fixed it. That's not how that shit works.

Guilt and shame are necessary things, but if it's all you feel or all you think you feel, you're not going to do anything about anything.

Like, going back to that chart from the accountability course I mentioned earlier, that chart has helped me immensely in not falling into a well of guilt and shame over things in the past I can’t change. You can only change what you do going forward, and if that involves taking time away from things for yourself to figure shit out, that’s what you’ve got to do.

With many fields, but especially creative/social ones, a lot of times it’s sort of out of sight/out of mind, and no one ever stops to check themselves because they’re afraid of losing whatever they’ve gotten thus far, of someone taking their spot, etc. It would be rad if we could all find some way to be kinder in this regard, to assure whoever that they won’t be forgotten if they take time to get better and actually mean it. Maybe they already do, more than one would think at least. That’s how I’m finding it, but I also didn’t have too terribly much going on in the first place, so I don’t know…

I suppose another thing to be thankful for in all this is I had my first incident-free May in 10 or more years. No fights, no meltdowns, no attacks, just smooth sailing. I’m hoping for more of the same next year when I maybe have more on my plate than I did this year but anyway...

Another thing I recently discovered was Assumptive World Theory.

Back in late May I started going back to the gym again for the first time since March of 2020. My therapist had told me to make a schedule for every week and follow that schedule. Planning things out. I already do this with my workouts, which I document in a notebook, but now I’ll also sit down once a week or every two weeks and map out work, gym, chores, bills, and then check with friends to see about hanging out during free periods. It’s nice to be able to look at that schedule every day and see what’s going on and sometimes even better, when nothing’s going on –I’ve watched a lot of tv and movies and even read a bit of fiction!

But yeah, so I took that scheduling and preparation to another sick level because now I pre-plan all my gym playlists on Spotify (follow me on Spotify at towerskinworldwide if you want a glimpse into that horseshit). Every once in a while I’ll listen to a podcast but ever since not really going to shows or hanging at bars and being subjected to music, I’ve been seeking out and actively listening to music more lately. Now I generally listen to podcasts over coffee/breakfast, while in bed or playing video games, or doing chores, whereas if I’m walking to work or working out or just vibing on some thoughts, I’m putting tunes on.

Anyway, one day I made a playlist of anime music. I was working out, in a zone, and then the Gurren Lagann theme came on. It got me to thinking about Gurren Lagann, thinking about how the series is such an examination of grief in a lot of ways. Then I thought “I wonder if there's ever been any scholarly shit written about Gurren Lagann regarding grief” and lo and behold I found an article someone wrote which kept referring to Assumptive World Theory as related to traumatic grief.

From there I came upon a theory of my own that everyone is grieving and only maybe half of us are any good at it --in “The Will To Change” bell hooks does touch on how men really don't know how to grieve – thinking back to clenching that goddamned fist, keeping my lips tight, staring straight forward. I should have cried. I should have abandoned whatever dumbshit stoicism I was trying to embody or project, whatever I thought “strength” was, and I should have bawled my fucking eyes out, fallen down, whatever.

But yeah, Assumptive World Theory. Basically when you have a traumatic event your assumptive world –the world you thought existed-- is shattered. Your have concept of goodness and all manner of things get mixed up.

And then I think of how much of my life I have had my assumptive world shattered. So many expectations from stupid TV or movies or books or even my parents just never worked out in those way and there have been times when confronted by this my brain would shrivel up and refuse to do anything except maybe go catatonic in a state of horror and despair. During those times I was occasionally able to cry, wonder how that works?

Anyway, yeah, I have a theory that everyone is grieving, so much pain is grief. Grief for the end of childhood; grief for a childhood never had; grief for lives never lived. It’s all grief. Right wing maniacs are grieving a past that they can't return to, that never existed. People on the left are grieving a future they'll never see or maybe worse, the one they will.

Just as theft has many definitions and applications, so too does grief. Many people are in some sort of grief whether they’ve experienced a death or not, and as mentioned earlier, grieving people can be messy as hell.

But yeah, I've lived a lot of lives in one body and now I'm living one life at a time and it's pretty tight.

While living one life, one thought I had was a self knowledge without self-control is just jerking off. If you're aware of a bunch of shit that’s wrong with you and don’t try to circumvent those things, fix them, then what the fuck? You can know yourself until the cows come home but if you can’t use that knowledge to control yourself then fuck those cows and that home! That’s just you flicking your brain’s bean, fuck that.

I constantly feel like I don't deserve the kind and supportive friends that I have, and I'll never be able to repay them all. That's not how you should think about it, but that's how I think about it sometimes. I know and hope that in time I’ll be able to balance the scales, or maybe allow myself to think I am more than I do –back to self-awareness versus self control, knowledge versus action, I am aware that I can get complacent and take things or people for granted sometimes, and I’m trying to be more cognizant of that.

I love my stupid Bluetooth speaker and my dumb anti-anxiety little pill fuckers and my big fat cat and my friends a lot. I I told my therapist a while back that I don't really see much hope for this world, but now I can see some small hope for like myself within it, that essentially I had made my peace with living in hell. That’s a big thing for me. Often in the past, I would just let the shit events and situations of the world envelope me and like drive me insane. Things still piss me off, make no doubt about that, but now I can sort of put it all in context with myself, what I can and cannot do –you know, that classic “the power to change the things I can, accept what I can't” blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, fuck it, we ball.

One interesting thing that my therapist asked me a while back... we were in a session and she was wincing because I would be like “oh, Piece Of Shit Alex would do this and dah dah dah” and she told me “even if you did something wrong in the past, you have to stop referring to yourself as a ‘piece of shit’, that's not good.”

She went on to ask “what does self-forgiveness look like for old Alex? Not for Piece Of Shit Alex, for Old Alex, the Alex who you were, there and then, not the Alex you are here and now?”

This really kind of floored me, she had a talent for saying things or asking questions at the end of sessions that would often get me to tear up a bit and think. She was really good and I thought for weeks about my answer but I never got to follow up because she randomly left the office after canceling the next appointment and is MIA. She’d cancel every third session anyway and didn’t seem to want to do in person sessions, I don't know, maybe she was a germaphobe wrecked by covid brain, or was immunocompromised or something I don’t know, I hope she’s alright. Almost everyone’s brains broke some way in the last few years, I can’t imagine this was any easier for the mental health care workers than it was my dumb ass. I have another therapist now and it’s nice to have a different brain looking at mine I guess.

But back to self-forgiveness...I mean the one question I came up with or series of questions to answer more so, was:

Have I done anything in this world that would warrant the death penalty?

No.

Have I done anything which in my perfect utopia would warrant the death penalty?

The answer is also no.

So if I feel I deserve to live, and if I'm going to live with myself, I'm going to have to forgive myself at some point or shit will get real weird, and real bad.

Then I took it a few steps further and I ran this by a friend and I think I saw some lights going off in his eyes when I dropped it:

Self-forgiveness goes beyond forgiving yourself for things that you've done. It includes forgiving yourself for things that have happened to you, been done to you. That seems maybe insane on its face, but we can consider how much blame we can place on ourselves for bad shit happening to us, and goddamnit we have to forgive ourselves for those things. That’s the only control or closure we’ll ever find for a lot of things that others have done to us, you can’t rely on them. It’s nice if it happens, but you can’t depend on that.

Anyway, I'm gonna try to tie this up with an anecdote-slash-horror story from my life around 2010. It was the summer of 2010. I had just gotten back from tour. I was in Cleveland, I had moved out of the Tower (for the first time) and I was going to be moving back to Milwaukee because I didn't find anywhere to live in Cleveland after the Tower and just was like, “what the hell? I'll go hang out with family in Milwaukee for a couple of months, save up some money, and then figure something out back in Cleveland.”

Well, the night before I was supposed to leave someone from Now That’s Class said “hey, come have a drink with me before you leave” and I was like “yeah, sure!”

So I showed up to the bar and they never rolled up and the bar was dead, so around 10:00 o'clock I went to the Hawk next door –for non-Clevelanders, the Hawk is a gay bar. I really only ever went to the Hawk to drink cheap. $2.50 sickeningly strong whiskey gingers (shouts out to Joe Korzan who put me on the whiskey gingers path, you fuckin’ dick! Love you)

So this night, I decided “whatever, I guess I’ll drink for a bit.”

My van was packed up and parked on Detroit. I had $200.00 in my wallet for gas and this and that.

As the night went on, I actually met some cute guy with shaggy hair and we were flirting pretty heavy and come bar close he said “I'm gonna go over to these guys’ apartment up the street if you want to come with me” and I said yeah.

And this is interesting for me, because, usually my engagement with men on a sexual, not really romantic, but a sexual level was Craigslist or way back Yahoo! Chat (Christ I’m old) or now the accursed Grindr. Very rarely like, “oh, you're a dude and I'm a dude” and one thing leads to another. No, my experience was being one half of two idiots online, like

“you want penis sucked?”

“I do want penis sucked”

“okay, where is your penis and you located”

It’s simple, but very digital caveman shit. Not great!

Anyway, I went back to this apartment off of 117th. I think it was near the storage units or whatever, if memory serves… “memory”, jesus. Someone was giving me mixed drinks at the apartment. There were five or six guys there and I was getting saucy, I think I had my hand down some guy’s pants. Then this big, bald motherfucker gave me a STRONG-ass drink which almost immediately made me start vomiting.

Later on I realized I was roofied hard as shit. Goddamn.

Now this big bald guy is patting my back in the bathroom as I puke. He took my pants and underwear off and gave me some basketball shorts and a clean shirt and tucked me into a bed in an empty bedroom, seemingly for me to sleep off the alcohol or whatever.

So I passed out. Then I woke up.

Now there was a person in front of me on the bed with no pants on, and the big bald guy was sort of like fluffing my dick up. Given the fact that I was able to get hard, maybe he hit me with some GHB too, I don’t know, I was hard. The bald guy told me to fuck the person in front of me and I did. If it seems like I’m being sort of ambiguous with regard to the person I fucked, that’s because I don’t know if they were a twink or trans or what was going on, they were smooth and pretty and had a dick as far as I can recall

I was woozy, fucking this stranger –everyone in the apartment had been a stranger, but this was an all-new stranger-- and I’m fucking this person without a condom, which was not my M.O. at the time at all, but 12 years later I’m clean, so what the hell.

But yeah, I didn't know what the fuck was going on.

I sort of rationalized it as “I mean, I came here to fuck somebody, I guess I’m fucking somebody?” and that would have been fucked in and of itself, but things got worse.

I went back to sleep after this and when I woke up and the bald guy was nowhere to be found. No one was there was there except for the person I had sex with. I went to put on my pants and noticed my wallet was in the wrong pocket and when I took it out all that cash was gone.

I threw the rest of my clothes on and asked “where the fuck is my money?”

All they said was “I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what's going on!”

“Where the fuck is that bald guy?” I asked, “Is this your place?”

They answered “yeah.”

“Do you know who the FUCK brought people over?”

They stalled and stammered so I did the only rational thing I could think of and kicked their flat screen TV in half and power-walked back to my van by the Hawk.

So right there, yeah, I guess I was raped, and on top of that I was robbed, I probably could have dealt with being date-raped had I not been robbed, been like, “that was a fucked up thing, I definitely didn't consent to that.” but then the robbery, that's just shit icing on a bad cake.

I remember a few months later, I was back in Cleveland and I was talking to a gay guy who hung out at Class and also the Hawk, kind of a sketchy regular. I confided in him this story and he was like “oh yeah, I know them, they're an asshole, I would have told you never to fuck with any of them.”

And I thought, “yeah, great, I'm glad that you have all this knowledge after the fact.” I kind of quietly resented them for making Me feel like the idiot in that scenario, at least that’s how it felt.

So then a few months later, I was working security and that same gay guy was having a problem with somebody. We had to kick him out and he was being a real dickhead about it, and I was remembering how he was so matter of fact, like, “oh you fucking idiot for not knowing, now you know that so-and-so is a piece of shit.”

So now I was mad again and when he tried to step back into the patio I shoved him hard onto his back, so hard the back of his head bounced on the concrete, he definitely got a little concussion. He shot right back up and motherfucked me up and down, but was certainly woozier than before. Part of my response, the shove, was just dickhead, frustrated security guard behavior, but another part of it was me silently saying “FUCK YOU for not warning me about those motherfuckers, FUCK YOU for acting like I should have known about this.”

Draw what conclusions you want from that, but either way I will take this whole call-out post as a kicked-in TV and a shove and I'm thankful.

[I will state that I have never roofied anyone and my only other exposure to GHB was in a consenting fashion with a gay couple I used to hook up with, just in case you’re getting the wrong point from that whole anecdote, I just wanna clarify there.]

Anyway, I don't know if that makes sense, but that's something that's been kicking around in my head for a while now.

I'm really happy that there are a lot more safe queer spaces and events for people to do their thing in now than when I was growing up and figuring shit out. I'm jealous of younger people now. They’re a lot more free to explore things and have way more information and educational material than I did –some would say they have more information than education, but I digress. I'm really happy for them. They get to make less of the old mistakes and find new and interesting ways to fuck up, at least that’s the hope, right?

But I don’t know, am I smart enough to be doing something else? Maybe. Was that smart enough to do something else? No, and it's fine.

As one person in a Twitter DM told me, she said:

“overall, it's obvious that you were real smart for a dumb-fuck and I trust you will or are working on whatever it is you need to do. I don't always assume that in people.”

Another person told me “--I feel like knowing you well enough and your openness about things that even if it were a 100% true thing I do not doubt you had changed from however long ago”

Those are sentiments I've gotten from a lot of people, and I appreciate the hell out of it, and I really hope that I can measure up to all that as time goes forward. As it is, I'm still really not going to any shows or playing any shows. I've been to a comedy show and I've been to two concerts at non-west side venues.

I would really like to return to podcasting because I've I've never felt more understood in any medium than I have in and with podcasting. It’s like, thinking on when I was at my most happy and fulfilled in life and that was when I was hosting parties. Parties in the suburbs, shows at the Tower, shows and events at the bar, yada yada yada. The mingling, the conversation, meeting people, the sense of cultivating a space, an ownership/being home, podcasting has often scratched that itch in a much more controlled and functional and dare I say healthy way and I really, really would like that back.

If people don't want to forgive me, that's fine.

If you don't want to forgive me, that's fine.

I just hope that you and everyone else can forgive yourselves for getting tangled up with me at all in the first place.

Or hell, forgive yourself for whatever bad shit’s happened to you. Can't hurt, right? Maybe? I don’t know.

Who's more sad about a Kellar-shaped hole missing from their lives? Me or other people? Maybe the combined missing of others adds up to how I feel? What is it?

I feel pretty OK.

I've become increasingly at peace with slow or limited or non-communication with people. The only downside has been that when someone does text or message back or holy shit: talk to me, I blabber to a ridiculous degree like unholy motormouth paragraph shit. Positive paragraphs, though, not negative hell-paragraphs.

Thinking about the shit-talkers in Cleveland history and where they are now, and yeah, I don't think that's coolest thing anymore, at least not like I used to. I might likely revert to being a demon like that at some point in the future, but it'll be sad. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll have a more sensitive touch, who knows

I bumped into somebody at work and she said, “hey, you’re Alex Kellar aren’t you? How’ve you been?”

I said, “eh, better than I should be I guess, I don’t know if you saw that thing…” and she said she had and I gave her the Cliffs Notes on what I've been doing and working on and this person, barely even an acquaintance, she told me “I mean who even are you if you haven’t been canceled at least once, right?”

And I was like, “yeah, damn, you're right.”

So I guess in closing...

Would I wish this on my worst enemy?

HELL NO I WOULDN’T. Why would I want any of my enemies gaining such self-knowledge, growth, and enrichment of their lives? FUCK THAT. DO NOT cancel my enemies. DO NOT call out my enemies. Let them live their soul-sick lives hoisting themselves by their own petards (unless they’re actively hurting someone, then do what you gotta I guess, I’m hardly in any position to be a moral arbitrator in these sorts of things).

Anyway, that's about all I got. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to call or text me if you have my number or shoot me an e-mail at [email protected]

Sincerely,

Alex “Accountability WORLDWIDE” Kellar

Bibliography/sources/whatever you’d call the stuff I’ve read or watched or listened to that helped inform this:

https://accountabilitymapping.thinkific.com/ (online course)

  Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet

 

Written by Mia Mingus for the BATJC, June 2016. (article)

https://batjc.wordpress.com/resources/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/

 

https://shadowproof.com/2019/01/19/beyond-prisons-transformative-justice-pod-mapping/ (podcast)

We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

By adrienne maree brown (book)

Beyond Survival : Strategies And Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement (book)

The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, And Love

By bell hooks (book)

https://www.academia.edu/6375003/_Later_buddy_The_politics_of_loss_and_trauma_representation_in_Tengen_Toppa_Gurren_Lagann

by Vyshali Manivannan (2011)