Look, I know it’s supposed to be healthy to talk about stuff, just to get it off your chest or whatever, but I don’t have anything to write. Not for some stupid fucking shrink who thinks he can cure my dad. You must be crazier than him.

Len is the only man I've ever loved, and he used to be so loving. It’s funny in a tragic way, how I used to think myself so lucky because I found a man who seemed to love me unconditionally. Now it seems there are conditions, stipulations, on everything between us, even the molecules that make up the air between us when we are actually in the same room. He hasn’t let me into the basement for seventeen days now. All I can do is go knock and have him scream and swear at me, but at least I know he’s alive.

It started around three years ago. I remember that shit because I was up all night after this rave where I ate like fourteen hits of windowpane and was still tripping hard around ten a.m., so my bud gives me all these pills, like Seroquel, Xanax and Trazodone I think, like five of each, and I just swallowed them and went home. I get to the driveway and my dad is standing in a scuba outfit by the passenger side door of the car they bought me.

Yes, the scuba gear. I remember: it was a Saturday morning, Len was going to teach Benj how to drive. Benj showed up, obviously intoxicated, and there was an altercation. When Benj asked his father why he was wearing the scuba equipment, Len just exploded with rage: just insanity in hindsight but at the time I could not tell if this was Lenny’s way of punishing Ben for staying out all night. Len was always a big Andy Kaufman fan. I never got his jokes.

I just heard about the fight from the two supposedly sane members of my immediate family. Supposedly dad saw an aura of ‘prions’ around Benjamin. He was screaming, “Kuru! You brought the sickness!” and Ben started laughing his ass off, he’s a little druggie asshole, so he starts fucking with dad, and that turned out to be a mistake.

Benji’s eyes got wide the instant his father snapped with all the screaming and finger pointing and I saw his pupils. Back when his father and I were in college, we had our phases. I knew those eyes. I wondered, “Oh no, what is my boy going to do? He’s high, his dad is in full aquamarine attire and my son is tripping; what stupid, stupid thing is my boy going to do?”

I mean, you understand it was pretty intense out there, right? Like, my dad, always a fairly grounded dude, now he’s Scuba Steve and afraid of some disease long eradicated, that only New Guinea aborigines got in the first place because they were cannibals.

So I wasn’t rational, but all those downers my boy gave me had me not paranoid in the least. I reached in my backpack, pulled out my gasmask bong, strapped it on and started lighting it. I decided I wanted him to think I was clearing the disease. He knew I smoked pot, he condoned it and even partook on occasion, never with me, but he told me.

I thought he was just fucking with me. So I let the mask get yellow-green thick with smoke before inhaling. On acid, you can usually just rip a bong and not cough, like gigantor hits; but those pills were causing respiratory depression or something.

Two seconds after trying to clear the chamber I start choking and I can't get the mask off. I end up on the ground hacking and struggling for the straps on the mask, which are around the back of the neck and up by the top of your forehead. But I cant see and I’m freaking.

My mom runs out to help. I’m coughing and I resort to pulling out the rubber gasket of the visor front and popping the plastic out to stop my eyes from burning and get some fresh air.

The whites of my eyes were now completely red with blood vessels breaking from coughing so hard and I had puke all over my face and my mom kneeled down to see if I was okay, and I was just resting, closing my eyes thanking some entity I didn’t believe in that I was alive.

Then I hear, “you bitch!”, then a loud thud, like a fist into hamburger meat, just awful shit. I open my eyes and mom is on the ground and dad is holding an oxygen tank, mom’s head is just caved in, I thought she was dead. The downers, the effect of those went away instantly.

Dad was looking at her brains inspecting for kuru. I reached into my bag, snorted a very huge line of blow and grabbed my Winchester pocket knife; I sharpened it every time I cut coke. I played possum for a minute, then just lunged and started stabbing. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. The D.A. says I got him twenty-seven times in the chest, legs, arms, hands, feet and scrotum.

If my brother hadn’t showed up and pulled me away I’d have killed him and wouldn’t be sitting in county waiting for a trial that is total bullshit. I know my mom is okay now, and I was on acid at the time, but she was fucking dying. Her head was split like a damn squash.

The raves here have become a problem. I’m the pariah to get tougher laws enacted to fix that problem and have the warehouses they are held in destroyed, at the very least create more parental awareness. I’m an acidhead attempted murderer, no one will believe my side because of my state of mind at the time. Perfect defendant for ruining the fun of all degenerates not helping the high school win football games.

While my father is still alive, still crazy, more abusive. My brother got sick of him beating my mom and locked him in the basement with nothing to read. His own personal jail. He barred the outside of the basement windows, and I hooked him up with a friend who has to take Risperdal who hates it. He sprinkles Risperdal in his food. I guess it hasn’t done shit…

You said something along the lines of if you had been allowed to kill your father, had your brother not stopped you, you wouldn't be sitting in jail. May I ask your thought as to why you would not be incarcerated had you killed him?

I had a backpack full of drugs and money…

Are you implying that you would overdose intentionally on the drugs, or simply flee?

I could have done all sorts of shit man. Lots of things were going on ain’t nobody know about. I got money. I got connections. I’m trusted. I don’t know, it was my dad, man. He taught me chemistry, throwing a spiral, fucking riding a bike. I loved him, man. I felt bad…


Joshua Arthur Knutson, Male, 28, Shitty Town, Iowa. Growing up in an area with no culture, Joshua Knutson, inspired by Mel Brooks' Life Stinks entertained himself by sleeping in a cardboard box for two months and pretending he was homeless at the age of 6. Started compulsive writing at 17, after becoming an over-enthused psychonaut. Now lives a mostly sober life and hopes to one day gain the clarity and perspective to finish one of the dozens of unfinished novels in his closet and also hopes to spread a wave of contagious intellect to the brainwashed masses. Joshua is a Pisces.