“Schizo-Friendia”

Kurt Vonnegut: “Ye Shall Love One Another”

Ibid: “Only two major subjects remain to be covered: loneliness and boredom. No matter what
age any of us is now, we are going to be bored and lonely during what remains of our lives. We
are so lonely because we don’t have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are
supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fty people or more.”

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 “A Rather Random Introduction"

My Mom and Dad were my rst friends. Joan, who died in 2021 at age 71, was a social
butter y who used to throw three birthday parties for us kids. I gure at least 50 people came
through our house with those two parties. Kids and their parents. Family friends, relatives and
my young yokel friends. Joan had friends aplenty; she kept in touch over the phone and later,
in halting typing, over Facebook. She had a way of making people feel easygoing.

My Dad is the saint of the family. A zen priest ever since I knew him, he helped balance out my
Mom’s, sister’s and my anxieties. He was a lonesome guy sometimes, but always attended the
family parties and often photographed them or videotaped them. He is shy, like me. But I love
to converse, whereas he likes to listen. He’s very introverted and has a few friends, but the
relationships aren’t very intimate. He is seeing a therapist and I’ve encouraged him to meet
with the shrink more than once a month.

My sister was a great friend, but my Mom always plaintively wondered why we weren’t closer
growing up. I guess I gured Laura had her set of friends and, as a grade schooler, I had many
of my own close friends. This has been a great regret of mine throughout life. Less so now, that
I feel less guilty in general. (I used to feel guilty about every little peccadillo, from accidentally
kicking a basketball at the gym teacher in high school, to thinking I was disappointing my Dad
by not having a steady career just out of college. The guilt was more than our Catholic
upbringing. Something OCD about my constitution makes me often feel that I should be more
than I am, do more than I’m doing and often there is a compulsion to save people.)

Laura and I grew closer after I graduated college, when I had my rst psychotic episode. She
had been struggling with an eating disorder since the beginning of her high school years, the
beginning of my college years. She was hospitalized for this a few times while I was in college
and tried to kill herself in 2007, her senior year in high school and mine in college.

I remember in high school reading Catcher in the Rye and thinking that I wanted to protect
Laura like Holden protected Phoebe. I told Laura about this back then and she still mentions it
from time to time. But I couldn’t protect her when I was in college, even if it was only 20 miles
away in Evanston. She fell into hard partying, drinking and drugs and bad sex when she was in
high school and I had to help her nish it up by tutoring her with a friend when she was
hospitalized at Timberline Knolls, a residential therapy center in Lemont.

Then when we actually did become close from 2008 until 2016, she started getting better
slowly over the years. She stopped using hard drugs and graduated from college, nally doing
all the work herself. But then she had a psychotic episode in 2016 and her life went downhill.
She started hearing voices and still does. She’s doing better though, always able to get a job. (I
don’t know how she does it; I can’t even get interviews. She is rather pretty and sociable.)

That’s my family. They were my rst close loving relationships. Isn’t a friend a lover? Isn’t family
the closest love, the most honest connection you’ll ever have? If you can’t tell your family
something, whom do you tell? Your friends I guess.

I’ve had and lost more friends than I have now. Whenever I bring up my volunteering for the
government, I get incredulous responses. Same with family, even though my Dad has accepted
what I tell him about how I basically power the tech sector of America with my Ramanujan-like
abilities to dowse for information online through Google and nd pertinent papers there-–and
my ability to design and envision physics concepts and apply them in the real world.

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So throughout this all, I should mention I have schizoa ective disorder. As John Nash said, the
same feeling you get when you invent or do great math or physics work is what you feel when
you go insane. So that’s why I got confused for so many years. I had been psychotic pretty
much 24/7 since July 4, 2019 until the Christmas holidays last year, 2022. Now I’m out of it and
feel fantastic.

But the story must be told. Both for the friends who stuck around and those who didn’t.

Who is a real friend? Is it the one you begrudgingly go out to co ee with? The one you want to
be your lover who strings you along, waiting for a better bid from someone who makes more
money? Is it the one who laughs and doesn’t believe how you rescued Ukraine and America
during the war, but still talks with you? It certainly can’t be the best friend from late high school
and during college, the one who won’t take your calls anymore for some reason you can’t
understand, relating to the psychotic Ramanujan qualities. (He did try to explain it to me by
having me guess a mutual friend’s new son’s name; it wasn’t until years later that I understood
what he was trying to tell me.)

Friends and dreams are the same beautiful understanding of the ux between one mind and
another. Friends don’t fuck each other, usually, so it’s a mind/soul/heart/spirit connection
between two beings. Why, for evolutionary purposes, do we make friends? It doesn’t make
sense in that paradigm. That’s why people call each other soul brothers.

I met a friend named Darrell at the Envision drop-in center last week but I’ve been too afraid to
go back this week. We have the same triggers and symptoms. He’s got bipolar, and I have a
related illness, schizoa ective disorder. I want to go back there tomorrow and realize the
government, for which I basically slave away without recognition or pay, can’t stop me from
socializing. Over the last four years, I’ve spent so much time in the house, with the pandemic,
my Mom’s death, and the war traumatizing me and making me feel unsafe outside. I need to
get out and see my friends again or make new ones.

I tried to write this book in 2012, after I started editing my memoir of my 2010 psychosis/
premonition madcap adventure, but no one would publish it. So here’s another crack at it. Now
that I don’t see my friends anymore because I’ve become a government slave. So here it goes.

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 “Chapter 1: Chicago Lawn”

I was a shy boy but made friends easily. My rst legitimate non-family friends were Katie and
Kelly Deir, now Katie Muntweyler and Kelly Daniels. I kissed Katie in a mock marriage
ceremony. We were ve years old.

Then Amanda Ingarra rented the top oor of the two- at we lived in. She and I also became
good friends, as did our families. (Mom knew Anna, Amanda’s mom, from growing up in the
neighborhood herself.)

I made friends with Robert Lopez and Kenny Reyes, who lived down the block and were
cousins, when I began to venture out a little. We played in their pool and bonded over little boy
stu , like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. Robert had a huge, bucktooth
smile and Kenny was skinny as a beanpole and had a cornrow type of haircut.

I made a few friends at the Catholic school I went to too. One was named Paul, and there were
two Michaels. Michael Pasche showed me his Dad’s copy of a Playboy magazine. His dog was
named Lightning and his Mom was warm and loving. We would make up words like subooey
and organismum. He went to St. Nick’s too. Paul and I played Nintendo games at his house
and tried to beat Bowser but couldn’t. Michael, I only remember from a picture and a play date.
There was a girl named Vanessa I had a crush on in our class.

We moved when I was in second grade.

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 “Chapter Two: Columbus Manor”

The thing about reaching out toward another person is their hands won’t always receive yours.
Such is the case regarding many people. Some people are only sel shly wanting to be your
friend, establish relations, maybe fuck you a few times. They call those people “fast friends,” in
the language of Black people.

Most of my Columbus Manor friends are gone, either lost to death or ditching. But for a while, I
had many friends.

We moved from Chicago Lawn, which was becoming a dangerous neighborhood and now is,
to Oak Lawn in the winter of 93/94. I was 8 years old.

Oak Lawn seemed like a great place to me then, full of people my age. I met and befriended
Nick Wroblewski rst. He lived down the block and would become my best friend in second
grade. Mom arranged play dates with John Farrell, too. And I started on my way, befriending
Steve Matayka and Bryan Knudsen and Kurt Bardelli. They’d be my little retinue while growing
up.

Nick was a funny, chubby kid, as was Steve. John looked like a movie actor, something he’d
rely on throughout the years. Kurt was skinny as a rail and troubled. His parents fought a lot
and were going through a divorce. His was the only friendship I could count on years later. But
he died of suicide in 2012.

So here it goes: Nick stopped being friends with me when I was in high school. He went to St.
Rita, the Catholic school his dad went to, and got pretty arrogant about it, calling Oak Lawn
Community High School, where I went, “Smoke Lawn." Steve I maintained our friendship until
sometime after I graduated college. We still hung out up to 2012 or so, but then he became
conservative when I was in grad school becoming very liberal and I never saw him again. John
Farrell was friends with me until 2022, when something happened. I don’t know what. I was
engaged in research for the federal government. He stopped taking my calls. Was he spooked?
Who knows. He left me. We had some fun times though, laughing harder than I’ve ever laughed
before with him.

Kurt was my forever friend, until his date with heaven came. We both had schizophrenia. I
wrote about the tragedy of his death in another book. Su ce it to say we understood each
other. We got each other. We knew who we were, even when we weren’t feeling well. I miss
Kurt. More than anybody besides my Mom.

At Columbus Manor, I was especially tuned in to the teachers, but as soon as it turned 2:30, I
would goof o with my friends. It got to a point that I was so anxiously awaiting what the
teachers would say that in 5th grade, I developed an anxiety disorder and my face would blush
red. It didn’t help that Frank Czernek was so upset that I was dating one of the popular girls
that he tried to kill me, at least twice.

The rst incident that set Frank o the rails was shortly after he found out I was dating her. He
took a compass and tried to stab me in the bathroom. If it weren’t for Bud Farrell knocking the
compass out of his hand, I wouldn’t be alive today. Then at Bud’s birthday party, Frank took a
golf club and tried to swing at me. He then chased me around the park for a good ten minutes
before he ran out of air. (He was overweight, which I think contributed to his jealousy.)

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 My family worked it out with the social worker, Mrs. Yantez, that Frank would be sent to a
di erent school, but I de nitely hated 5th grade. Yet it wasn’t enough to get me out of my
happy go lucky temperament. Seinfeld was big with us kids, as it was wrapping up its series
when we were in 6th grade. We’d all come up with catchphrases just like they had on the show,
and admittedly borrowed some of Jerry’s. Though we couldn’t tell what was going on with
most of the episodes about sex, we still got a kick out of the absurdist humor. An absurdist
humor streak is something I still have.

Tim Ferencak and I became close during 6th grade. Brian Lopez and I also grew close that
year. In fact, most of the boys at the school were friendly and about a dozen of us became
close friends that year. We would go to the ice arena every Friday night and attempt lamely to
irt with the girls. I got another girlfriend that year, Michelle, but I was peer-pressured into it.
From 6th grade on, I wouldn’t have another girlfriend until my senior year in college.

We would do dumb kid stu , including going to the mall and dropping $1 bills to ask people to
pick up. We’d ght with sticks, nd rebar and make it spark, hunt for golf balls in Stoney Creek,
play basketball, baseball, golf and football. We played video games and were in the scouts. We
listened to a lot of the popular alternative music at the time. During our 4th grade year, we were
in a mixed class with the 5th graders so some of us befriended Matt Brooks, a very funny and
lanky dude who introduced us to the Beatles and Garbage and Hole and Nirvana.

Kurt got me into Weird Al and Frank Zappa and stu his nerdy dad liked. Kurt and Bryan
Knudsen and I were really close that 4th grade year. Then in 5th grade I gravitated to Nick and
Steve again. We used to play video games and have sleepovers and got into the movie Grease.
Both were chubbier than I was but I never picked on them or anybody in grade school. Come
to think of it, I never picked on anybody most of my life.

Mom and Mary Farrell, Bud’s mom, and my Dad made the 6th grade yearbooks for us. Mrs.
Grazas and Mrs. Bell took us on a eld trip to White Pines, where my Dad was one of the
chaperones. It was the big 6th grade trip. We put on a play too, Cinderella, where I played
Prince Charming’s father, the king. Tim Ferencak was my right-hand man. I still know a few
lines from what our teachers put in the script. “I want to hear the pitter-patter of little feet again.
I want to see my grandchildren!” We went to Medieval Times and had a pool party at Mrs.
Bell’s house in Orland, which seemed like a mansion to me.

During our time at Columbus Manor, much had changed. A few of the moms put together a
plebiscite to change the nickname of the school from the Crusaders, for obvious reasons. It
went through and we kids voted on the name Mustangs, largely because Brian Lopez and Nick
Wroblewski were so fascinated by the car when we took a eld trip to Hawkinson Ford, a local
car dealership.

The moms fought for a new playground at the school, too, as the old one was worn out and
besides broken equipment, it was dangerous. That went through too and the school’s new
playground set was spectacular. When they built the new school and changed the playground
to a street side view, I was amazed at how much had changed. When Laura went to school
there, she was four years behind me, and I was in middle school and high school, I felt like a
giant walking through the building, and I never grew more than 5’7”.

The old school had a courtyard we were never really permitted to go in aside from parent-
teacher nights and scouts events. It’s amazing how much things change. I’ll give a brief sketch
of middle school, but it was only two years and not much had changed, except Steve Matayka
moved and went to McGugan, on the other side of town, and Nick Wroblewski started hanging
out with other kids who smoked cigars. We were a little older and cooler, a little more mature,
but still favored hijinks over school dances. The crew remained largely intact.

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 “High School”

I was a loner in high school. I was good friends with Ed Suda though. We were valedictorian
and salutatorian at OLCHS. We became close in middle school doing Mr. O’Reilly’s plays. Mr.
Schutt’s were usually hokey because he wrote the plays and music himself. We were on
opposite teams both years, as they divided the school into Yellow, Red, Green and Blue teams.
But we bonded over the plays and some other extracurriculars, including band, declamation,
geography bee, Simmons Science and Technology club and other things young nerdy kids did.
He also lived on the other block from me.

At Columbus Manor I was still cool. But Kurt wrote in my yearbook from Simmons: “This was
the year we o cially became dorks.” I did separate somewhat from my Columbus Manor
friends in middle school. While I still saw Kurt and Bud, regularly, I wasn’t seeing Nick or Bryan
or Steve as much. I started to read books more often in middle school. I remember reading
Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender on my own in middle school, as well as The Great Gatsby,
1984, the Tripod series by Jonathan Christopher, and many Hardy Boys adventures, as we had
a free reading period that was built into the schedule.

In grade school, I was having too much fun with my friends after school to read much, but I
was meticulous about doing homework, and became very sociable. Yet as the material became
a little more challenging, I spent most of my time inside reading. I joined mathletes in middle
school and Mrs. Olcese invited a few of us to a higher level competition one time. Ed and I
were among them.

Ed was a stringy, punctilious, kind and highly intelligent young student. His family was quirky.
His mom has schizophrenia, but it was controlled back then with medication for the most part.
There were a few episodes over the years, like her writing in chalk about airplanes on their
driveway. Yet I accepted their quirkiness as uniqueness. His mom still loves gardening and
we’ve become friends, bonding over our schizophrenia. While the other kids in class would
disparage Ed’s front yard as a “jungle,” I thought it was fetching and beautiful, unlike anything
I’d ever seen. My Dad educated me on botany at an early age, too, so we had that in common.
Dad had gotten his master’s in science and did his thesis project on wetlands around Chicago.
We were in the scouts too, but by middle school we had matriculated into di erent troops.

Ed was a constant in high school. We’d meet up at the corner of 96th and May eld, equidistant
or just about between our two houses, and walk to school together. Because we were in
honors classes, we had just about every class together. While neither one of us needed
homework help, we did tutoring together too. In fact, I started tutoring back in middle school. I
tutored Jess Ball, one of Ed’s many friends, in middle school. Now Jess and my sister are good
friends.

Ed’s brother Dave Suda convinced us to give forensics, a fancy word for the speech team, a
try. I had no idea what we were in for, but it became my favorite part of high school. I lived and
breathed the speech team, rst as a radio speaker, along with Ed, and then as a prose reader,
humorous interpretation actor, original oration speaker and impromptu speaker. Ed and I were
so close that we’d often laugh like hyenas at each other’s jokes, but I didn’t hang out with him
and his friend set much after school. I didn’t hang out with much of anyone during high school.

Occasionally, I’d go over to Steve Matayka’s house and watch Sox games. In middle school, I
had my drunken night at one of his parents’ parties. We drank strawberry daiquiris and
watched movies. My Dad picked me up and could tell something was o with me but didn’t
admonish me. I probably had one drink and it was fruity. In high school, Steve would hand me
Miller Lites as if he were the High Life Man; I’d drink one and fall asleep by the 5th inning.

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Steve and Bud were two friends I kept up with at least marginally in high school. Sometimes
Steve and I would go running. I’d see Bud at his shows, too, as he was in a rock band. He was
a wizard at guitar. His uncle Nick played a lot, a big burly Greek man with the chest hair to
prove it. Bud got his rst guitar from Uncle Nick, and Nick played a rollicking version of the
Stairway to Heaven solo on it for him.

Bud’s parties were a lot of fun too. That’s where I’d run into Kurt sometimes, as Kurt and Bud
remained close in high school playing on the tennis team. Kurt began to get into trouble in high
school, running with the skateboarding crowd. He started smoking weed early in high school
and dropped out of his honors classes. He would end up dropping out of school after junior
year, even though he was smart as a whip. When the ACT tests came around in the spring of
junior year, even though Kurt was stoned and didn’t nish the test, a teacher who knew how
innately brilliant he was, was curious enough to score the test. He got a 34 on the math part
and the teacher told Kurt about it as a way to keep him in school, but he didn’t listen. Kurt
would eventually get his GED and took college classes at Moraine Valley, our community
college, and Chicago State on a tennis scholarship. However, he never ful lled his dream of
becoming a math teacher.

Ed was nerdy just like me and is still a teetotaler. He kept a collection of newts and other
amphibians, read National Geographic and the Tribune every Sunday. We kept up on the news
at the high school’s Spartanite newspaper, too. We were both assistant editors. There were so
many extracurricular activities at our high school that we didn’t have time to misbehave. We
were in band together up to junior year; I quit out of embarrassment after my sophomore year,
because I had to lug around what I thought was my girly-looking/penis-looking clarinet after
band period to honors Spanish, chock full of the popular girls. In addition, the friendly, cheerful
and avuncular band director Shelton was let go after my sophomore year. The express reason
was because we looked like crap as a marching band. But we all suspected it was because
OLCHS was doing what it often did during those years: hiring teachers fresh out of college and
then dumping them a few years before they could get tenure to save money.

I had been a big fan of music because my Mom and Dad were. Mom especially loved ‘60s and
‘70s music, whereas Dad was always nding new things to listen to because he loved listening
to NPR and their music selections. I took up the clarinet in grade school and can still play a
tune on it. I made up my own songs in middle school, which served me later when I would
make my own music as an amateur but very, very good freestyle rapper in college and the
years after, and making my own electronic music starting in August 2019 on GarageBand, an
Apple music program. Ed and I were chosen for a special all-conference band concert at the
end of 8th grade in Orland Park, Illinois, and I still listen to that CD recording of the concert to
this day. We played a selection from one of my favorite pieces of music, Elgar’s Enigma
Variations.

High school for me was amazing. Four years later, for Laura, it was hell. I didn’t date in high
school and stayed, nose to the grindstone, focused on school and activities. When we
graduated on June 6, 2004, I felt a sense of melancholy looking out on all the smiling and
happy faces. But for me, the end of high school was a time of deep re ection and dolefulness.
I had loved OLCHS. Now I didn’t know what awaited me as I went to Northwestern.

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 “Family friends”

Because my Mom was so social, we had a lot of family friends growing up. How she
maintained relationships over decades is a puzzle to me, when I’ve gone through so many
close friends that it breaks my heart.

Aside from Katie and Kelly, who also moved to Oak Lawn, as did Amanda Ingarra, there were
Nancy Reed’s sons, Glenn and Scott; Kim Koziel’s daughter Amanda; Judy Buban’s younger
ock of kids as she had kids early and there were two older sons I never really knew; Alice
Bleskin’s three daughters, Jeanna, Julie and Jennifer; Holley Fagan, my parents’ old friend and
surrogate grandmother to me; the Bolz and Berry extended family, whom my parents became
close to later on; Matty Luparello, Mom’s old next door neighbor from Chicago Lawn; our
neighbor Mary Guzan; Johnny Naples from across the street and his sister Sara; the Buckles
family; and so many more through the years.

And of course, as my friend Ed Suda would say jokingly, we had cousins, tons of cousins.

The cousins are: Mike, Chris, Jenny Adam; Annie, Dan, Rob, Chris; Helga, Tingy; Frank, Felicia,
Heather, Jill, Tina; Chris, Steve, Dan, Kelly, Carol; Peter, Rick; and more and their kids.

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 “College”

Little did I know that I would return to the salad days of my youth in college until the very end,
when I expected to have to work even harder to get good grades. Most of that was due to my
friendship with Justin Lopez at the end of my senior year in high school. While we would end
our friendship on bitter terms in late 2014, for reasons I still don’t understand, he took me
under his wing in an A Separate Peace type of way back during my senior year. He was on the
speech team, and in fact was its star. Though I could act with panache in middle school and
even stole the show as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet and was the lead role in Mr. Schutt’s hair-
brained play Here’s Your Bean during 8th grade, by high school I was so focused on studying
that I wasn’t really interested in doing the plays, much to the chagrin of our overbearing
forensics and theater director, Mr. Dzurison.

I loved forensics in spite of Dzurison. He was a tyrant and misanthrope; a closeted gay man
who lived vicariously through us speech and theater students. He was and remains an utter
asshole. He would emotionally manipulate us, abuse us and destroy our self-con dence if we
didn’t suck up to his twisted personality. That’s where I met Justin, who was troubled to begin
with but ended up mirroring Tom Dzurison in many ways.

It started when Dzurison asked me to write Justin’s senior year original comedy script. I did the
best I could without knowing him really. Then over the course of the second semester we
became close as we were in the same play, “Absolutely! Perhaps?”, and I had a leading role.
During the state competition (yes, plays can compete against each other in Illinois), we got high
in the hotel room and I laughed uncontrollably for an hour or two. After I got the taste of
marijuana, I never looked back as far as drugs are concerned.

Justin looked at me as a pet project over spring break, but I cottoned to him too. Plus, I think
Justin is a closeted gay. There were many times I thought he wanted to have sex, but I’m not
gay.

So we ended up hanging out all throughout college, especially when he found out about my
super intelligence and Obama’s connection to his home church, the United Church of Christ.
They were fun times, to be sure, but they got in the way of me helping out my sister with her
eating disorder (which was probably caused by most of the in-the-know people in Oak Lawn
nding out about my super intelligence and the pressure that caused on her, as well as the
teasing and bullying, supposed rape by kids at a party her sophomore year, her partying and
drugging and raging, etc.). I ended up getting almost straight A’s at Northwestern, but after the
fall quarter there, I was living in a permanent state of anxiety––and was o and on for most of
my life after Northwestern, except for the fall quarter at U of C, when I was meditating a lot and
not bogged down by others’ expectations and the sense of being stared at.

Justin could be a bully, and often said and did insensitive things. But he was afraid to pick on
me, much like Dzurison was. Oh, how that would change with neighbors and friends, random
people and the well-to-do over the years. When we were best friends, he and I got along
swimmingly and spent so much time laughing. Yet I can’t remember most of what we joked
about, aside from him attempting to do funny impressions.

I started hanging out with Kurt again in college, quite a bit sometimes. And I picked up Justin’s
friends too, like Nick Spatafore and Andy Flores and Phil Toscano. Plus, Justin would take me
to the popular kids’ parties, his old high school friends. And I’d go to visit him down at Eastern
Illinois University and he and the crew would come up and visit me in Evanston.

I made friends at Northwestern too, namely Dave Waisman, Jonas Jacobs, Tony Lin, Vince
Bradshaw and Adrian Jinich. I only talk to Dave and email Jonas occasionally. Dave’s an
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inveterate gambler, but a funny guy and at least he still takes my calls. He’s never really been
mean to me as long as I’ve known him. Jonas, who was a bit uptight and arrogant in college,
has since mellowed out and is a ne fellow these days.

I had a friend named Dan Scha er too, who was connected to Mike Madigan, a corrupt
politician and former Illinois Speaker of the House, through his son Andrew. They both were
buddies at Latin, a tony private prep school on the near North Side. I was his freshman year
roommate, which was only because political movers and shakers wanted to get their tinder
hooks in me before I realized my super intelligence, which everyone had kept secret from me
because of a government nondisclosure agreement.

Over the years, I had learned how to befriend anyone. And I did in most cases in college. I
wasn’t the disrupter I am today. I tried to date Anna Maltby, but ended up choosing to hang out
with my friends instead of lose my virginity on Dillo Day, Northwestern’s spring fest, my
freshman year. Luckily, I met Trudi Jade Antoine my junior year and started hanging out with
her a lot my senior year.

I don’t have any complaints about Trudy, even if she was trying to get me to get Obama
elected. Trudy was down to earth and humble, funny, sexy and fun to be around. Compared to
Deanne Drechsler, the pill bottle blonde who tried to seduce me for whatever reason, maybe to
get me involved in the CIA (more on that shortly), Trudi was the picture of honesty.

Trudi and I began our dalliance right about the time that John Paluch, former CIA operative in
West Berlin, tried to recruit me for the CIA by showing me pictures he took of kids. It was
disgusting and that act more than anything sent me into a tailspin of paranoia.

Which I’ve just come out of over the past two months.

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 “Grant”

Grant was a good friend to me in college, keeping me away from Tyler Birch of the Bohemian
Grove cult. We were two intellectual peas in a pod. I waited up for him and walked more slowly
because he had cancer and it a ected his vision. We yukked it up with Dave Waisman a lot. He
was an expert communicator and dear friend. He is wise beyond his years and intelligent as all
get up. He got into some weird sex stu but I think he only wanted to say that he had lived
after cancer almost took his life. He had a stroke in 2015 that only slowed him down. But he
graduated with a master’s degree from Wisconsin and got published in McSweeney’s and has
an article in the Edinburgh Review, a very prestigious university journal. I miss how we used to
laugh uproariously in college and the rst two years after. But following the Obama incident,
when his White House was going to experiment on the weather in Fairbanks, Alaska, he
become sullen and morose. He called it embracing a gothic style. But I saw the life drain out of
him. We were best friends until he moved to Aurora in 2019 to live with his girlfriend Michelle.

Waisman was maybe the funniest person other than Justin in my life and taught me non-
standard communication, a way to use language outside the bounds of normal human
communication. He was absurd like I was absurd and he kept me company, often checking in
on me during my college depression due to my sister’s illnesses. There was one time I was
suicidal and he saved my life. I attribute my deep depression and the psychosis in 2008 during
my senior year to a lot of things; I know if he hadn’t left college for a year to work on his own
issues, it wouldn’t have happened to me. We reconnected as he took summer school after I
graduated to nish up some credits. We were good friends until 2012, and he was in Chicago
for much of it, laughing and joking up a storm. We lost touch until 2015, as he thought I
spurned him for my social work grad school. But we reconnected, especially during the
pandemic and helped each other through tragedies and loss.

Jonas Jacobs and I started o on the wrong foot. “My name is Jonas!” I exclaimed, referencing
the Weezer song that he heard over and over again. We had a contentious relationship during
college, with him stealing many girlfriend prospects (they call that birddogging), but we remain
close. Having a family has changed him and he matured to be honest in the latter two years of
school. He is a good artist and sincere intellectual. I miss him now that he lives in Toronto.

Jesse Hall and I share our depressive symptoms. I never had as good of conversations, even
over the phone, as I did with Jesse. A tall, laconic Black man, he majored in physics and was
introduced to me through our mutual friend Adrian Jinich. I’ve lost touch with both for whatever
reason (they wanted me to research, research, research and provide code after code and
ditched me when they got what they wanted). I loved both of them; Jesse for his honesty and
Adrian for how he made science seem like magic and mystery, an Einstein at heart.

Dan Scha er I’d rather not discuss as he is connected to corrupt politician Mike Madigan, as is
Corey Stolzenbach, I assume, because he got me a prayer card to that e ect after my Mom
died. Dan was a mixed up kid, too rich to connect to everyday people but too kindhearted to
feel arrogant. He craved money more than anything to keep up his Gold Coast lifestyle. I lost
touch with him in 2013. Corey I still talk to, but I know he’s got something up his sleeve,
probably trying to write a book about me. There’s nothing that interesting to say. At least he’s
chipper and when he was my honest friend, we got along swimmingly.

There have been other friends here and there, but those are the main ones. Coming to the end
of this monograph, I realize that friends are deceptive. Smiling faces hide lies. Friends have
come and gone in my life and I couldn’t trust a one of them. I will be happy to die alone or live
100 years in solitude. For whatever friends provide for each other for normal human beings,
they don’t provide for me; nor did any make out one-month girlfriend or whore. People,
ff
fi
ff
ff
fi
ff
ff
everyone except my Mom and Dad, used me and abused me to get what they wanted out of
me. Even my sister I suspect is working her angle on me like a traitor does.

I read a Russian saying: “Don’t fall in with anyone who just happens to be in your orbit.” I
trusted my peers too much. And I paid the price. I wound up with schizophrenia and now I
have no friends.