Josh Hilden's Blog, page 30

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Eight: It had to be a Clown

The amusement park was creepy as fuck and our “Investigation” consisted mostly of stopping strangers and demanding that they tell us what they know followed up by busting into two groups and breaking into random buildings around the park. I went with the Hippy, the dog, and hot brainy chick in glasses. The other group was the guy in the ascot and the vapid red head, personally I think they just wanted to go off in private and fuck. But hey I don’t care how they make their own fun.

After about an hour of poking into dusty abandoned buildings and being attacked by hornets we decided to take a break. The Hippy and the Brainy Chick went off to “Find the others” but I think that they wanted to get a little naked. The dog however stayed with me and when I sat on a clean piece of ground he laid his head on my thigh.

I stared into his big liquid eyes and what I saw was something more than doggy intelligence. I asked him if he wanted to hear more of my story, the part that sort of dealt with an alternate reality version of him and his friends. I did not expect to get an answer but the damn dog raised his head and seemed to nod at me. I was surprised but less shocked than I would have been before I met these travelers.

“Alright mutt, if you want to hear it then I want to tell it.” I said and then settled into a more comfortable position.

This, as always, is a therapy session and the doctor appears to be in.


I fucking hate clowns. And when I say hate I mean they scare the shit out of me. They make me want to run and hide in a closet and not come out until someone in a position of authority comes and assures me that they have all been eliminated and presents me with a semi truck filled with their bloody fucking noses as trophies.

Let me back up for a second.

I like to think that I am a more or less practical man regardless of my bent for science fiction and horror. I believe in science and logic no matter how much I wish there was magic and fantasy. I enjoy playing in the boxes that were created by the artists and dreamers that walked this path before me, even more than that I love building my own boxes and filling them with monsters and fairies that have been birthed in the furnaces of my imagination, but at the end of the day I will take the words of men such as Einstein, Hawking, and Darwin as my gospel.

That being said I have three very real and very irrational fears. Firs I fear the dark. That is a universal fear that most if not all human beings share and I don’t think that I really need to delve into it. The second is zombies. Everyone knows of my fear of the ravenous dead and there have been several essays dedicated to that very subject. I am sure that there will be even more of those entries before I tire of the subject. I also have deep terror of having dysentery, but since in my mind that is a rational fear it does not fit the criteria of this essay.

My third fear is clowns, and I can tell you moment that I developed that fear. When I was very little my favorite television show was Scooby Doo. On one of the episodes, I believe they were in a recording studio, there was a maniacal clown. There was a scene in this episode where the clown sprang out and scared Shaggy and Scooby. It also scared the shit out of me. I screamed and ran from the room. Even back then my flight or fight response was skewed toward flight.

As the years went on there were other things that cemented my fear of clowns. The movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the crimes of John Wayne Gacy, and most dramatically the book IT by Stephen King followed by the miniseries where Tim Curry played the monster clown Pennywise.

Everyone that I tell this fear to laughs and acts like it is a big fucking joke. I think because I have been able to control my fear reactions since I was little, in my family if you seemed afraid of something it would eventually be used against you, it has never been taken seriously. I don’t react to clowns with panic and cries, instead I clam up and be as quiet as possible. I try not to draw any attention to myself in hopes that the clown will pass me by and devour someone else instead. I think of it as a plain sight way of “Hiding in the closet”.

I always try and tell myself that it is stupid to fear clowns. I try to remember that they are supposed to be funny and that it is supposed to be their job to make children laugh and entertain the masses. I try to think of Krusty the Clown but to me a Simpson’s character can never be terrifying. I try to think of all of this but then I see a clown on TV or gods fucking forbid in person and all I can think is that this mother fucker wants to rape, kill, and eat me … maybe not necessarily in that order either.

So yeah I hate clowns, I just fucking hate them.


I was going to say more but there was a noise from deep in the dog’s throat. I heard it and I was sure that I had heard wrong but before I could say anything else he lifted his head, licked my hand, and then trotted away.

I swear to god that dog said he was sorry.

Gen Con 2012

I did Gen Con in Indianapolis for the first time since I attended as a writer for Palladium Books in 2008. It was me, my lovely wife Karen who celebrated her birthday on the last day of the convention, and my oldest and youngest sons (Josh & Alex). We met up with some of our best friends while we were there. We saw but did not get to spend nearly enough time with our friends who are more like family Bill & Jessi, Tammy, and Mikey and his daughter in-law Christina (sorry we missed you Justin). We also had the opportunity to hang with and game with my friend Lonnie and my friend and fellow writer Jason Marker. We played in Jason’s awesome Robotech game using Savage Worlds Rules as opposed to Palladium Rules. I got to talk to Brandon Aten and Mark Oberle, tow of my best friends from the Palladium days and I got to meet Brandon’s beautiful wife Sarah who is pregnant with their first child.

A highlight for me was that I finally got to meet the Publisher of Third Eye Games and the man that I still say saved my writing career, Mr. Eloy Lasanta. Eloy is one of the nicest and hardest working men in the business. As an extra surprise I got to talk to his wonderful wife Kristen via phone.

Karen and I attended several panels and seminars about the gaming industry and working in it. We listened to George from Eden Studios along with Ken Hite talk about Zombies in gaming, a panel that I thought maybe I should have been on.

:-P

We listened to Monte Cook talk about his new game Numenera. This game looks amazing and I have backed the Kickstarter even though he has more than met his goals. But maybe the best thing we did was a panel that I had signed up for at the last minute. There is a group of film makers doing a documentary about Dungeons and Dragons. They showed fifteen minutes of footage and then took questions. What little I saw looked amazing and I became so enamored with the project that when we got back to the hotel that night I braved the crappy and suspect Wi-Fi to back the projects Kickstarter.

I really hope they get their funding.

Gen Con was amazing and I am sorry that I have let some bitter memories keep me from attending in the last few years. We are already making plans for next year.

I already can’t wait.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Seven … Water Water Everywhere!

I have been away for awhile and apparently my current therapist has become too busy with his “Shooting Schedule” … whatever the fuck that is. So I was walking down the street with the sun rapidly setting and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do when the van pulled up. It was covered in green and blue paint with red lettering. For a second I wondered if the side door was going to be thrown open and a couple of rapy looking guys wearing rubber gloves were going to offer me candy and a hand job whether I wanted them and not. But when the door did open there was a homey looking interior and four teenagers and a big brown dog with a blue collar.

They look really familiar to me and I rack my brains unsuccessfully to remember where I know them from.

They offered me a ride and considering that the sky looked like it was going to burst open and dump buckets of water on me I accepted. We settled in without wearing seat belts in rebellious defiance of the laws of the land. I thought could smell the distinct aroma of The Pot but it was faint and did not bother me. There were two guys and two girls in the van with me and they seemed like a laid back bunch. When they asked me why I was on the road I told them that I was looking for a new therapist and needed to clear my head.

They got a strange look on their faces and then huddled up for a few minutes.

I swear that the fucking dog was even talking.

When they broke their little huddle they as a group offered to hear what I had to say. I had to consider the offer carefully, the last time that I had talked to more than one therapist they had tried to kill me. But I needed to keep getting the story out so I relented and began to talk.

I swear the fucking dog was listening intently …

As always this is a therapy session and the doctor, or doctors in this instance, is in.


The defiance that my teenage daughter has been showing me lately, fighting me at every turn whether it is detrimental to her or not, reminded me of this story that I am about to tell you. I sometimes, ok all the fucking time, think that Chrissy is the kid I would have been if I had not been such a terrified kid. If everything had not terrified me and I had not felt so isolated from everyone else I might have been like her. My daughter says things that I remember thinking when I was a kid but would never have dared allowed to slip from my lips. I hate it when she does it but secretly in my heart of hearts I am proud of her. She fears almost nothing and will always stand her ground and not compromise her beliefs. In many ways Christiana Hilden is the kid that I wish I could have been.

My grandmother had a pond in her back yard. My grandfather had in dug out I believe when my mother was a child but I am not sure. All I know is that it was always there. The pond was fully stocked with fish and it was the place where I learned the ins and outs of the art of the fisherman. Fishing was and still is a big fucking deal in my family, amongst the men I think that it is safe to say that if it is not the number one leisure and outdoor activity then it is without a doubt in the top fucking three.

I was, and still am, a really shitty fisherman.

But the pond was also the perfect swimming hole. The spring that had been tapped was cold and clean and the bottom was sandy and not filled with gooey slimy mud and rocks. All of the kids in the family would gather there to swim every summer. Of course I was the one that did not know how to swim. That never stopped me from enjoying the shallows and braving the “Above my Head” areas while wearing a neon orange life jacket. I loved the water, I always have loved the water and I believe that I always will love the water.

But my lack of desire to learn to swim seemed to stick in someone’s fucking craw.

One day my mother told me that my grandfather decided that I needed to learn to swim and had signed me up for swimming lessons. My grandfather, and probably my mom but I don’t know for sure, had decided that I was going to learn to tread water like a good little fat boy whether I wanted too or not. I know that if my mom had anything to do with it then her motives were pure and altruistic, she just wanted her son who loved the water to learn to swim. But I know that my grandfather was probably motivated by a desire to male me more of a man.

I have no confirmation of this belief but I am convinced that even if that wasn’t his only motivation it was still a major factor.

I believe that the lessons lasted a week. I attended the classes with my uncle Ernie who my grandfather (his step father) had also decided needed to learn to swim. The pool was at the high school and the lessons were early in the morning. The pool area was cold and smelled of chlorine, they probably had to keep the chlorine levels so high to keep the teenage germs under control but damn that was the most heavily chlorinated water I have ever been in.

I fucking hated swimming lessons.

The instructors were either indifferent or mean. And by mean I mean that there was one male instructor that always commented on my weight. I swear to god there is always some fucking asshole that has to say something about the fatty in order to make themselves feel better.

I hope Jason Voorhees kills all of them … slowly.

And by indifferent I mean that they just didn’t fucking care. I am really surprised that nobody died or almost died … oh wait … I DID ALMOST FUCKING DROWN!

On the last day of swim lessons we had our final exam. We had to attempt to perform all of the things that we had been taught and finish it with swimming the width of the pool in water over our heads. I did not want to do it, I begged to not have to do it, I cried like a little bitch when it became apparent that unless I wanted my ass beat I was going to get in that fucking pool and prove that I was mightier than Poseidon mother fuckers!

What actually happened was that half of the way across the width of the pool I slipped below the water and inhaled.

It probably only lasted for five seconds but it seemed like an eternity. The water burned my lungs and I started to freak out. One of the instructors, the only thing I can tell you about her is that she had large breasts because adult me still remembers her hard nipples pressing into me as she pulled me to the side of the pool, grabbed me up out of the water and saved my life. I coughed out about a tablespoon of water and that was the end of swimming lessons.

They gave us papers at the end of the last class telling us if we passed or failed. Of course I failed, and failed hard.

Interesting post script, my mother framed that “Diploma” and hung it in my room. I have no idea why she felt the need to frame and hang my humiliation. I don’t think that she did it to humiliate me, that really is not my mom’s style, so I am really fucking perplexed. But today I can swim just fine. I taught myself years later and I still love the water.

I do know one thing, when I told my daughter that I thought she should have swimming lessons when she was little she said no.

If she can make it to 18 without me killing her she is going to be a hell of a fucking woman.


The Therapists, including the dog, seem to have really enjoyed the story and ask me if I want to keep riding with them. I don’t have anything better to do at the moment so I tell them that I would love to. They tell me that they are heading to an old amusement park to check out some stories that they have been hearing about disappearances and a possible maniacal clown.

Now I know where I have seen these people before, and they traumatized the fuck out of me as a kid … Jinkies!

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Six … Tales from the Cleft

The therapist tells me that he wants t go for a walk around town as we talk. He says that they have been shooting all day and he needs a break and a slice of pizza. I am good with that the weather is clear and the humidity is low. We saunter down the street with little local shops and real brick sidewalks enjoying the weather and the happy people.

“When you were at your saddest where was your happy place?” He asks me.

I am taken back. Most of the other therapists have just let me ramble till I find my thread but he is asking a direct question. I like this change up and am surprised by how easy it is for me to answer the question.

I begin …


The subdivision where my grandparents live in Ohio is built on the very Moraine that the city is named after. It was built in the mid 1970’s on the edge of the heavily eroded miles long mound. Back in the day (Like around the time of the flood in 1913) the locals used it as an unofficial dump and so you can dig several feet anywhere on the hill and find debris. There are also two dumps on the moraine one of them active and nasty and the other closed and green … like giant puss filled boil covered in layers of makeup.

In the late 1970’s a second subdivision, the very one that would later buy a home in and then financially melt down in, was built near the one that my grandparents live in. Between them is a creek that has cut a massive cleft between the two. At the foot the creek empties into a channel that takes it to the Little Miami River and at the head is a park. Between them is a jungle a jungle of dense secondary growth forest that descends from the top of the hill to the bottom.

The cleft is studded with the ruins of the past that generations after generation of kids have left there since before the subdivisions were built. It was the place that we played as kids. We would stage mock wars, make camp fires, and build forts. I hated living in Ohio when I was a kid and the cleft of woods between the subdivisions was my safe place, the place where I could go and be safe

My last summer living in Ohio as a kid we built the hill fort. On one side of the cleft the wall got very steep. Me, my unnamed brother, my uncle, and my then best friend Jeff spent days digging a fort into the side of the hill. We strung a hidden rope up the side to make the climb up the very steep hill easier and four fifths of the way up we found a natural shelf to act as the base for the fort. That thing was awesome … wish I still had it.

There as a very flat and clear area where the creek got its deepest (maybe three feet deep). There were no trees there and the remains of a very large and apparently complex fort built by teenagers in the early eighties were strewn amongst the tall grasses of the flat area. It was in this area where the bottom of the climbing rope was hidden and it was also where we had out fire pit. The pit started out as a bare patch of earth and following a fire that nearly got out of had it grew into something a fire marshal might have built. It was deep, wide, and surrounded by a foot high wall of creek rocks. One time we decided that we wanted to make pool to swim in. The water was probably as nasty as all get out but we didn’t know that. We spent a weekend building a dam of old boards, rocks, and mud.

Mind you I had never read IT by Stephen King at this point.

The pool was pretty awesome when it was finished. But after the first heavy rain the dam was washed away. But hey, I never said that I was a fucking engineer.

The Cleft was also where I had my first “Bug Out” kit. I was always thinking about running away while I lived with my grandparents and my mother. Not because I wanted to be on my own but because after years of moving around I figured I should always be prepared to get the fuck out as quickly as possible. The kit was a plastic tub hidden in the foliage under rocks. Inside I had a clean change of clothes, a jacket, a toothbrush, a mess kit, a canteen, a back pack, a poncho, several cans of food, a knife, rope, and about fifty dollars in change that I had “collected”. When I moved away I never had the opportunity to retrieve the kit.

I wonder what happened to it.



My therapist commends me for having a kit for getting away and is even more impressed when I tell him that I have supplies put away for me and my family to survive an emergency. He says that he has to get back to work but stresses that he still want to hear more of my work experiences. Then he asks me to consider the worst nightmare I ever had so we can talk about it next time.

That’s all for today.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Five … Everybody’s working For the Weekend Part 3: “I am the security department bitches!” or “The last time I turned pussy and ran at work.”

I arrive at the dinner but the Bearded Therapist wasn’t available for this session but he sent his best friend to talk to me. The guy is kind of surly and does not really seem like he wants to be here. But we sit down and he orders a slice of pizza and some chicken fingers. I order some apple pie with whipped cream and cinnamon.

He asks me what I want to talk about and asks me to be quick because he has to get back to the shop. I feel a little rushed but I decided that I need to talk so I start.

He seems very disinterested.

As always this is a therapy session and the doctor is in … even if he seems like a jerk.


I need to tell you right off of the bat that I am skipping a job in the sequence of employment. I worked at Meijer three different times over nine years and it’s where I met my wife. I am saving the pertinent details of that job for when I write about Karen. And no the pertinent details do not contain an anecdote of Karen and I balling in the dairy cooler … that was one of the managers and a security guard.

Say Sorry.

I quit Meijer the first time in a steaming rage of adolescent stupidity in January of 1997. After I quit and had enough time to regret it, like some men regret blowjobs from sixty year old partial amputee tranny hookers, I was broke and desperate.

Much like those same Hooker clients.

I hunted everywhere for a job with nothing to show for it in three months. We were subsisting off Karen’s income as a cashier at Meijer and NO child support from her ex-husband, it would be many years before we saw a dime from him and then it was so grudgingly. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said there was an opening where he worked. He was a security guard at the Dayton Daily News building in downtown Dayton. This was before the new facility was built in Franklin Ohio.

I had no desire to be a security guard. As I have said so many times over the course of our journey in the words of these essays I am a complete pussy when it comes to confrontation. And unfortunately confrontation is an essential aspect of security work. I did the interview and the only thing that remember about it is that Karen drove me and brought all of the kids (four at that time) and when the parking meter ran out she had to circle the block waiting for me.

She was not happy.

I got the job and it was … well it sucked. I busted my ass at that job because I was told that I was next in line to be made full time. To be honest compared to the rest of the people that worked there a donkey that was retired from Tijuana would have been a super star. While I was there I went above and beyond. I worked double and triple shifts, I came in every time I was called no matter the occasion, I did extra duties such as sitting in a van for eight hours guarding equipment in downtown Dayton, and I reported on some of my fellow employees to my bosses because there was a massive power struggle going on in the department.

Yeah … I am more than ashamed of myself for that last one. Of course I also wrecked the security van in a parking structure built in the 1950’s but those fuckers couldn’t fire me for that one.

The Dayton Daily News was the only job where I have ever flat out kissed the bosses ass. My boss was a tall piece of shit named Albert. Albert was the slimiest cocksucker that I have ever had the disservice to work with or for. He was a steroid juiced misogynistic douche bag that stuck his cock in every woman and girl that crossed his path. He was a backstabbing piece of shit that seemed to get off on setting his employees against one another. Part of me believes that the son of a bitch sat in his closet of an office and jerked off watching us on the security monitors. But at the time I believed I was one of his “Boys” and that as long as my lips stayed super glued to his cinnamon ass cheeks I could enjoy the ride.

Then I had dirt on Albert that it never even crossed my mind to use.

During the adventurous week of sitting all night in the van guarding the equipment downtown I had to relieve Albert on one of the mornings. I drove to the van and nobody was in the front seat. I walked to the back and opened the rear door.

Inside was Albert fast asleep … and Gina.

Gina worked first shift security and she was a nice girl of eighteen. Albert fawned over her and gave her whatever she wanted. But people were never upset with her about it because she seemed to be genuinely nice. First off the problem with what I walked into was Albert asleep (they had fired a guy for it less than a month before). The second thing was Gina being there (we had been told that nobody was to join us in the van).

Oh and third they were both 90% naked.

Albert freak and yelled at me to close the door. Five minutes later they drove off and I took my shift guarding the stuff. I never said anything. I never even thought to say anything. At that moment I still thought Albert was my friend and even though he was twenty years older than her I figured they were consenting adults.

Of course I was a naïve and their “relationship” was an open secret.

There was another woman working security. Her name was, and probably still is unless she did us all a favor and jumped off a bridge, Ruby. Ruby was the first black person I ever met that actively hated white people on the surface and was not afraid to let everyone know it. She was also wet for Albert and was fucking him in his office from day one working at the paper. After she found out that her mahogany stallion was fucking the little white girl she went insane. She started taking her anger out on everyone else and making an already combative and stressful workplace a hundred times worse.

All of the drama culminated with Ruby calling Gina’s father and telling him in a disguised male voice that Albert was fucking his daughter. It was never proven that she was the one that did it but when I picked up my last check she was there working and she laughed her fucking head off at me and called me the dumbest motherfucker she had ever met. But I am getting ahead, Albert decided that it was either me or another guard that had done it and tried to have us fired, but since it could not be proven Human Resources would not allow him to do it. Instead he started cutting hours and holding me to an unbelievably high standard. But I was a good worker and there was nothing he could get me on.

Then I called in sick one night.

He decided that I was not allowed to come back without a doctor’s note even though I did not have a single write up. At first I was going to fight it and set up a meeting with Albert’s boss … but then I pussied out and quit.

I had no intention of keeping that job but I was ashamed of the way I left. I never got to have that reckoning, I never got to have my say, I never got to be a man and confront that piece of shit.

I eventually got to have that experience and reclaim my manhood … but that is another story, for another day.


The therapist looks at me and nods. He tells me that he can understand why I just quit instead of dealing with the bullshit. Then he reaches across the table and offers me a hand. We shake and he tells me that he wants to hear the next part of my story.

That appears to be all of the time we have today.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Four … No Pets Allowed

I was going to do a regular “Story of Josh” installment today with the “Therapist” and everything else. It was going to be about all of my pets and how they have affected my life but when I was half way through the essay I was bawling my eyes out and trying to keep myself from wailing. Once I had stopped crying and blew the tons of snot out of my system I decided that I just can’t do it, it hurts too fucking much.

What I will say is this.

When we were forced to leave our home we were unable to find anyone who would take our pets and we had no money to send them to “No Kill” shelters. So we did the only thing we could, we released them in the country. I know some of you are no cursing me and telling me what a bastard I am for doing that. I wish I could sit you all down and justify my actions to you, and let me tell you a year later and I still CANNOT think of a different solution that doesn’t involve them being gasses. At least this way they had a shot at finding someone to take them in or making it in the wild.

I really wish I could make myself believe that at night.

But none of you can possibly hate me or think less of me more than I do myself about this. I have literally vomited thinking about it.

All I want to do now is give you a list of all of the pets I have had as a child and as an adult in alphabetical order. Thank you for putting up with this my friends, I fear this is as close as I am going to come to dealing with this pain for the time being. Maybe when I can put the pictures of my fur babies out in the house again I will take another step.


Aaron (hamster - male)
Abner “Abby” (cat - male)
Baby (cat - female)
Bobby Cat (cat - male)
Choo-Choo (dog - female)
Hermy (cat - male)
Honky (cat - male)
Jay Bird (cat - female)
Juno (cat - female)
Little Boo (cat - male)
Little Tails (cat - female)
Lizard “Lizzy” (cat – male)
Maggie May Hilden “Maggie” (dog - female)
Molly Moo Hilden “Molly” (dog - female)
Morris (cat - male)
Natasha Serenity Hilden “Tasha” (dog - female)
Oscar (cat - male)
Peek-a-Boo (cat - male)
Penny (dog - female)
Princess Buttercup “Buttercup” (cat - male)
Simon (cat - male)
Snickers (cat - male)
Snowflake (cat - female)
Spooky (cat - male)
Spunky (hamster - male)
Tabitha “Tabby” (cat - female)
Tails (cat - male)
Yoda (cat - female)
Zoe (cat - male)


I miss them all everyday.

OK, I am devastated right now seeing that list. I did not think that just writing their names would be this hard. They were my friends and now they are gone. I have nothing else to say other than I will never have another pet that is a mammal again, I just can’t handle the guilt.

Right now I do have a pet. His name is Tatsu and he is a gorgeous bearded dragon. He originally belonged to my oldest daughter but she decided to give him to me when she moved to Wisconsin.

I love him.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Three … Oops, I ripped my pants!

We are on a bench in front of a Starbucks drinking hot chocolate again. My Bearded therapist says that most of these essays sound like I think that most people are idiots. I tell him that is how I feel 99% of the time. He laughs and asks me if I liked going to school when I was a kid. I have to think for a few moments and then tell him that most of the time I did before I moved to Ohio but that second grade kind of sucked. He looks intrigued and asks me to explain.

This is a therapy session and as always the therapist, or some facsimile thereof, is in.


I was never a person that ever wanted to draw attention to myself. I was much happier being in discomfort than asking people for help or from them to do something that would allow me to relieve the discomfort. I would much rather do something or go somewhere that I didn’t particularly care to rather than express my own desires and then have people criticize me or worse laugh at me. This was not isolated to any one person or group of people either. Family, friends, coworkers, authority figures, even people I didn’t like. I would like to rationalize this is some way but the reality was that I was just too fucking scared of what people would say or how they would react to my wishes and desires.

Even when saying something would have allowed me to avoid humiliation.

I second grade I was going to Lincoln Consolidate Elementary. We were not in a proper classroom. Due to overcrowding we were in a portable, a trailer that served as a classroom. There were about twenty or thirty on the schools grounds. I kind of liked Lincoln but in second grade I had Ms. Hawkins. This woman was the first teacher I ever met that I knew did not like kids. She was doing the job just for a check not because she had a passion for it.

Ms. Hawkins had no love for me and I had nine for her but we were polite to one another. I did my work on time and she didn’t hold me up for ridicule in front of the class like she did so many others. I don’t think she kept off the hellish stage because she cared one way or the other for my feelings. I think she did it because maybe she knew that something wasn’t quite right between us. I thought maybe she knew that I didn’t like her and didn’t respect her.

Mid way through the year this was confirmed.

At the parent teacher conferences following winter break, actually we still called it Christmas Break back then but we don’t want to piss off people with Santa Claus and a bunch of fucking elves, I went with my mom. These days that is normal, kids accompanying parent to conferences, but back then it was practically taboo. But for some reason, probably no sitter, I went with her. I waited outside the portable while mom talked to Ms. Hawkins. I played outside in the cold unaware of the weirdness going on behind the thin door.

When mom came out of the portable she seemed to be trying to decide f she should yell or laugh. As we walked toward the parking lot mom told me what had happened in the conference. She said that Ms. Hawkins had broken down in tears and asked my mom why I hated her (Ms. Hawkins not my mom, contrary to popular belief I don’t hate my mom). Mom told Ms. Hawkins that she had no idea what she was talking about and that she would talk to me about it. I told mom that I had no idea what she was talking about and that I didn’t hate Ms. Hawkins.

I left out the part about not liking or respecting her.

A couple of months later we were in the morning gym class. Ah gym the bastion of sanctioned sadism in public schools across the nation … CLIMB THAT FUCKING ROPE! Anyway we were doing sit ups and the seat of my pants ripped. I should have said something about it but that would mean drawing attention to myself and exposing myself to ridicule and humiliation. So for a couple of hours I thought I was so fucking clever in hiding my ripped pants from the staff and students.

I was in my reading class three portables down, I went to an advanced reading class in second grade fucking sue me, when the teacher told me to go back to my portable. When I got there Ms. Hawkins was waiting for me holding a pair of pants. She made a show in front of the other students of telling me that I should have told her my pants had ripped and that she had seen the rip as she had watched me walk to my reading class. The entire class snickered.

Yeah, “Why does Josh hate me?” … bitch.

So yeah, not only was my second grade year spent in a portable that froze in the winters and cooked in the summers but I also had to put up with shit like that. Is it any wonder that I escaped into TV and comic book when I was a kid? Although in retrospect I should have had more fun with her.

Some people may be questioning the veracity of my statements at the beginning of this piece. For many years I was that kid, afraid to make waves and always trying to just get along and stay in the shadows. But that person has been gone for awhile, these days even when it scares me I try to speak my mind regardless of the consequences.

Hence these essays.



We finish the hot chocolates and my therapist is looking at me kind of funny. “So basically you were a pussy.” He says and I throw my empty cup at him laughing.

I believe that is all of the time that we have today.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty Two … “Roll for Initiative Bitches!”

We are sitting on the beach drinking orange juice and vodka. The Bearded Therapist is in a good mood, he has asked me to come back east with him and visit his home and his family. I ask him if that isn’t a conflict of interest. He nearly dies laughing as chokes out,

“Have you forgotten I’m not actually a doctor?”

I laughed sheepishly and took another drink … then I began to talk.

This is a therapy session and as always the doctor (even if he is a fraud) is in.


My first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) occurred when I was about five. I was spending the night with my Maternal Grandfather and his new family and my step uncle Bert asked me if I wanted to play a game.

I practically idolized my uncle Bert when I was a kid and if he asked me if I wanted to shave cats with safety scissors I would have given it try. Of course this worship didn’t stop me from running him over with a go-cart when I was trying out his homemade track in one of the farms fallow fields.

And worshiping him didn’t mean he was the smartest guy in the room. At his Brother Ernie’s birthday party one year we had a scavenger hunt and one of the items was a ducks feather. That year that had been raising ducks and the section of the barn where they lived was carpeted in feathers. We could have harvested a hundred in thirty seconds and avoided the evil fucking ducks. But to Bert this was not in the spirit of the game and he approached one of the bigger ducks. With the rest of on his team looking on he jerked a feather from the ducks tail.

And that was when all hell broke loose.

The duck swelled up, spread his wings, and then it screamed. I swear to god I had no idea that ducks could scream. It charged Bert and proceeded to bite the shit out of him as he was paralyzed with shock. That was bad enough but his anger was more than enough to rile up the other ducks that then began to flock and attempt to attack our group. There was no loyalty or cohesion amongst us and we fled with an “every man for himself” mentality. The chaos continued until we escaped the barn and sought refuge in the house.

Like I said, not that smart.

So that night we sat down at the bar that was the centerpiece of their living room and Bert brought out these books with the most amazing covers. They were decorated with monsters and warriors. I was enthralled. That night I rolled up my first character and played my first game.

I was hooked.

My mother bought me the first of many boxed sets of D&D (the classic red box) not long after that and I began to craft my own adventures and draw my own maps. I could go on and on how D&D changed me, how it expanded my imagination and allowed me to sculpt my own worlds. It would be more than fair to say that D&D helped create the writer that I have become. I collected books when I could, I watched the television show like an acolyte, and I had the toys … fuck I wish I still had the toys, especially my Nightmare Figure.

But it was only a couple of years before I left D&D as my Role Playing Game (RPG) of choice. I wrote the following in 2006 when it looked like Palladium Books was going to go out of business.

“I feel as if I have been kicked in the gut.

Palladium has been one of the few constants in a life that has not always been happy or safe.

In 1983, when I was 6 or 7 my Stepfather got me my first copy of PFRPG because he knew I loved D&D. I was hooked in 10 minutes. I have run hundreds of campaigns and thousands of "One Off's" over the years.

My home was broken early and my father was a raging alcoholic and my mother was a prescription drug addict. My little brother and I spent my lonely and scary nights when we were left home alone all night, becoming heroic elves super powered heroes and eventually those awesome Ninja Turtles!

As I got older and, thank the gods ~yours and mine~ we moved in with my grandparents with our new baby brother. It was there that my dark and moody preteen self discovered After the Bomb and I still say to this day that it changed my life. My love of the post-apocalyptic genre and survival against the odds grew from this game. I still run it to this day.

I got a little older and moved in with my now sober father and my stepmother who barely tolerated me and my "stupid games". Robotech was my game of choice, until Rifts.

Rifts inspired me and caused me to flex my creative muscle to a degree that I thought impossible. It made me a writer and a dreamer.

I got a little older and moved to Dayton Ohio after graduation to return to the only loving home I had ever known, with my grandparents.

For a few years I ran some pickup games and read all the books that came out. When I was married in 1996 and was blessed with 3 wonderful stepchildren and then 2 more of my own I saw in them the same love of games and fantasy in their eyes that I am sure once shined in mine.

My children dabbled in games for several years, and my oldest read my books voraciously.

Last January it all changed and I began running my wife, my kids, my baby brother, and several of our friends into a game that has flourished till this day.

To put it very simply, Palladium has spent 23 years of my life making me HAPPY!

I considered editing this because upon rereading it made my teeth hurt. But these essays are about the truth and this was the truth about how I felt in April of 2006. RPG’s have always been important to me and that hasn’t changed despite the experiences I have had in the industry, and because of them. Some of the best people I have ever known have been met around a table as we slung dice and killed dragons.

With the exception of some work related crap that is no longer relevant in my life I have only had one negative reaction to my love of RPG’s. But fuck it was a dozy.

I was always kind of close with my extended pool of cousins on my mom’s side of the family when I was a kid. Most of them were and still are very religious but back then I still loved Jesus and enjoyed things like vacation bible school in the summer. But after I moved in with my grandparents and my life became more and more Kafkaesque I began to question everything and think for myself.

My grandfather was in the union and every couple of moths they would have a fish fry to raise money. I always volunteered to help with the fry so that I could go for free. During one fish fry I was working the drink station, really just changing tanks as they came empty. I was plugging along when one of my cousins, let’s call her Lisa, that I had always been very close to as a child came up to me. She was, and I suppose still is, about twelve years older than me. She proceeded to berate me for playing RPG’s and tell me that I was going to go to hell if I didn’t stop.

Yet another example of “Not very smart”.

An interesting postscript to that little encounter, I know that she went to my mom before she confronted me directly and mom laughed in her face. My mom has always supported my hobbies even if she never understood my fascination. When we lived in Saline she would type up my characters on her Smith Corona electric typewriter (that’s right electric fucking typewriter, it even had a little digital display where you could type out a few hundred words to make sure they were right before the mechanism imprinted them on paper) whenever I wanted her to. She was pretty cool like that.


The Bearded non-therapist asks me if my cousin was born that dumb or did she learn it and I laugh, it’s not really that far from the truth.

And I believe that is all of the time that we have today.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty One … “They’re coming to get you Barbara!”

My therapist is drinking what at first I thought was “frou-frou” coffee. It actually turns out to be hot chocolate made from real chocolate and cream. My kind of fat ass, I sit across from him and order the same thing with real whipped cream and cinnamon. We both laugh at the cream in our mustaches and then I notice the tattoo on his forearm. It’s of a little girl on a tricycle, his niece he tells me, but she is a zombie.

It’s a really fucking cool tattoo.

This leads to us talking about our mutual love of the zombie genre. And that conversation leads inevitably to the scariest night of my childhood and the repercussions that altered my destiny forever.

As always this is a therapy session and the doctor is in.




When I was 10 years old my father let me watch a movie. It was Halloween night and everyone was exhausted from trick or treating and gorged on candy. It was about ten at night and I was just about ready to doze off for the evening when my dad and my step brother came in and changed the channel.

“You going to love this,” my father said as he set down on the couch next to me.

As the black and white movie began to play on the small screen I was quickly becoming bored with it when I heard something emanating from the TV.

“They’re coming to get you Barbara!”

Immediately my attention was captured and for the next 2 hours, although it felt simultaneously like 2 minutes and 20 hours, I was a prisoner. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. Every shadow, every sound out in the windy Michigan night, and every creek in the house was one of the living dead coming to get me.

I was terrified.

My second exposure to the zombie genre was not from a movie but from the unholy portal that was MTV. This was when MTV still played music and long before the abomination that it has become. This time I was over at my cousin’s house and the video for Michael Jacksons Thriller came on. Some of you might laugh at the idea of dancing zombies being scary but back then that was a badass video. It was shot by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London) the effects were done by Rick Baker (also American Werewolf in London), with a voice over by the immortal Vincent Price (He’s Vincent Mother Fucking Price and no credits are necessary you just need to fucking respect him bitches). That sequence where the zombies are busting into the house is a terrifying sequence damnit, I fucking love it!

Both of those exposures were important but the moment where eternal love and terror of the zombie genre happened when my Great Uncle Jerry showed me the original Dawn of the Dead. To this day Dawn is my absolute favorite movie ever. From the plot, to the characters, to the fear and gore Dawn is the perfect Horror Movie. But when I first saw it and it got to the sequence where the Philadelphia SWAT Team is clearing out the projects I nearly shit myself with terror. To this day it is the movie that I have seen the most.

Over the years I have sought out Zombies in every medium that I could find them in Books (World War Z and Night of the Dead being my favorites at the moment), Video Games (Dead Rising my favorite), Comic Books (Deadworld and the Walking Dead rule that roost), and Role Playing Games (All Flesh Must Be Eaten is probably the best of that lot).

My zombie world was rocked in 2004. That was the year that Zack Snyder rebooted Dawn of the Dead. I went that movie wanting to hate that fucking thing. The zombies ran in that movie, taking the nod from the brilliant British infection movie 28 Days Later, and the zombie purist in me wanted to burn down every theater showing the flick and lock a naked Zack Snyder in a closet with a hungry Polar Bear. I went to see the movie on opening day with my mom, my oldest daughter, and my little brother. The movie started up and then that little girl jumped up like a fucking spider in the hallway. To this day that is still the scariest thing I have ever seen on the screen.

Ninety minutes later the movie was over and I was pissed off … I loved it.

As an interesting follow up to that experience. When I tried to sleep that night I found it impossible as I sat up all night watching cartoons and jumping at every sound outside. Also my daughter has never forgiven me for taking her as to this day she is still terrified of zombies.

Ah kids, you can teach them to fear what you fear.

I wrote a zombie role playing game for Palladium Books in 2007/2008. All I am going to say about that is that one of the great regrets of my life is signing away my intellectual property for chump change and then it is not even used. I can’t use it and the publisher will never use it. It’s a learning experience but it still pisses me off, more at myself than the publisher. I should have known better. But I moved beyond that and I have written a 175,000 word zombie trilogy that I am publishing through my own company Gorillas with Scissors Press.

One of the greatest days for nearly all zombie fans was October 31, 2010. That was the day that the Walking Dead Television Series premiered on AMC. That was the culmination of the hopes and dreams of the fans and acolytes of the genre since those words were first uttered in a Pennsylvania cemetery … “They’re coming to get you Barbara!”

Everything that I do is influenced in one way or another by my exposure to zombies as a child. When I enter a building I always scope out the ways out and make sure that there are no obstacles in my way. I always sit with my back to a wall. I always have access to a weapon in one form or another. There are disaster supplies in my car and in my home, I tell people that they are in case of natural disaster but in reality they are for when the dead rise.

I won’t seem so crazy when the dead are eating you and your children!


The bearded therapist laughs at that last bit and tells me that he can relate to my love of the zombies genre and he would like to read my books. I tell him five bucks per copy and he looks at me like I hit him with a dead fish.

I really like him.

The Story of Josh Part Thirty … I am a Writer (Installment #6): “Yeah, I Once Worked in that Dead Medium”

OK, so the new therapist, the large bearded man, meets me at the coffee shop. He makes a lot of jokes about the breeding habits and does a hysterical and offensive imitation of one of his best friends who is apparently Chinese. He tells me that he is a writer and pulls out a stack of comic books and graphic novels to show me his work. It’s pretty good and I tell him so. He asks me about the first time that I wrote for somebody other than myself and that causes me to zero in on my senior year of high school.

This is a therapy session and as always the doctor is in … and this doctor wrote about the Universal Monsters killing NAZI’s.

How cool is that?


My senior year of high school I joined the news paper hoping that it would give me a chance to hone my skills and get some published work to my credit. At first I was excited about it. The teacher that oversaw the paper was also my senior year English teacher and she liked the idea that I would be on the paper staff.

When I started on the paper it quickly became apparent that there would be little to no creativity in that class unless I forced it through. I really wanted to write something silly to counterpoint the crap that we were assigned to write. Eventually I convinced the teacher to allow me to write a serialized story about animals rising up and attempting to kill off humanity and take over the world. It was a really dumb story and it makes what little hair I have left hurt when I think about it. But it was fun, it was original, and it was all mine.

The story, called “Animal Antics”, developed a small yet devoted cult following. And when I sat small I mean like a dozen people but damnit cults start that way and I believe I could have convinced them to make me their god if I had tried hard enough. There was also a large, read maybe 20 total, group of people that hated the story. But even back then I was of the opinion that I was only writing to entertain myself and if others didn’t like it they could fuck off.

The teacher was not a fan but she tolerated because unlike most of the rest of the “Staff” I could write not one but two pieces every month that were coherent and most importantly ON TIME. But there was one son of a bitch that hated the story, because according to him crap like that shouldn’t be published in a news paper. This mother fucker also attempted to steal my girlfriend at the time but that story is a nut twister that really would be a pity party. He and I fought about it more than once we never had a final fight about it but I like to think that in another world somewhere in the quantum foam he and I had a wrestling match in the middle of the papers office and I crippled him with flying head-butt.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

The paper at the school was a real paper. It wasn’t on the Internet (that barely existed in 1994) and it wasn’t on the schools intranet (I don’t think that hell hole had one). So yeah I can say that I actually worked for a news paper that was written, printed, and sold OLD SCHOOL.

That just made me laugh, I imagined Joey Fatone (sp?) saying that.

In the last month of school the newspaper teacher, who as I said was also my English teacher, took the cheapest shot at me that a teacher ever has. And I let the bitch get away with it. Earlier in the year she and I had gotten into a huge argument about whether or not Stephen King was a real writer. I said he was and she claimed that he was a hack. These days I would have recited the definition of hack to her;

But back then I just told her that she was wrong. This argument had come after she been reading a short story I had written about the last minutes of a plane crash and the conversation a little girl on the plane has with death who is on the plane disguised as a young college student. She had hated the story and had made a disparaging comparison between my story and the works of Mr. King. She got even madder when I had taken that as compliment and then asked her if she could have done any better.

Yeah even then I liked to stir the pot every now and then.

So the day that she took the shot at me I had long forgotten the argument although I am sure she had not. She called me over to her desk and asked me to read something. She handed me a piece of paper and on it was a poem/essay written by a student in my year but none of my classes. She was a hell of a writer and I thought it was pretty good although it was dripping with the overly wordy gothic crap that permeates so much vampire fiction. I told me teacher that I liked it. She looked me right in the eyes and said,

“That is a real writer.”

The words were dead pan and there was no smile, I read the corollary instantly “You are not a real writer.”

I looked at her and said, “Sure it is, if you think that Anne Rice is a real writer.” And then I walked away.

*disclaimer: I may not be a fan of Anne Rice’s style and stories but I do acknowledge that she is a real writer*

That Josh knew that he was a good writer, especially for his age. It wasn’t long after that that I put my pencil down and wrote very few words for too many years. When I returned to my craft I was damaged from years of atrophy and had the bad luck to reemerge into a semi-toxic atmosphere. But that is a story I am unsure I want tell again, not because I am afraid to tell it, if I can drive so many people I love away with my words and still press on I am not afraid of what people who are already well aware of my views might say.

But the story of me and Palladium Books is an old and tired one. I don’t have any passion left for that subject. On one hand I owe Palladium everything and on the other I owe them nothing. So I am willing to call it a wash and let it be. I think it is safe for me to say that there will not be another essay about my experiences with Palladium. It’s a closed chapter of my life.

Say Sorry.


My therapist says that he does not like Anne rice either but that he agrees that she can write. He does wish I would tell him about my working for Palladium but I tell him that I am serious that subject is closed. Everyone has bad professional experiences, how you recover is the important part … I think I have done a good fucking job of recovering.