This one stays away from the portfolio and there may be mistakes:

I’m writing this at 1:41 am, I have taken my medication, which normally knocks me on my ass, but I am still awake. While I don’t want to get into the specifics of my ingestion of drugs, it’s safe to say that what I have going on should theoretically make me sleepy.

I read over 100 pages, did a bunch of research, and now I guess I’m just wired.

So, whether we thank drugs, or we thank anxiety and sleeplessness, it is time. Time for me to talk about my cousin, a man who is both awesome, and weird as fuck.

My cuz and I were born two weeks apart, and we were inseparable for many years. I also lived with him and his mother after my parents died, and in our 20s, he moved in with me at my place.

Needless to say, we are, or were, pretty tight. He has kids now and is devoted to them, something his father never was to him. He has put his whole soul into raising the little buggers. He’s also a single dad, a veteran, and built like a refrigerator. A tough son of a bitch and an all-around decent guy.

Alright, enough compliments, it’s time to roast the big guy, but first, I need to explain his upbringing, as I feel it sheds light on much of his strangeness.

My Aunt, mother of the cuz, took me in when I was a teenager after my parents died. Everybody else, including my legal guardian, stopped caring about me the second they were gone. Not my Aunt, though.

She pushed me to get a GED, a license, a job, a car, and my own place. She was my mom in many ways, and I’ll love her forever.

She’s also a little batshit, extremely cold, and rigid as hell for somebody who was a hippie in the 60s. My parents were old bikers who had me 10 years after my brothers, and they were not strict at all, so living with them was an adjustment for both of us.

This rigidity resulted in my cousin spending at least 50% of his childhood grounded. At least. When he became a teenager, he would do things like huff Glade. Meanwhile, his mom was giving him hair follicle tests for pot.

Another time my Aunt found his DIY bong and lost her shit thinking it was a crack pipe. She had a craft room in the basement alongside a very nice, finished living room area with a wood stove, drop ceiling, and those track lights with the dimmer switch. It was the nicest place I had ever spent significant time at in my life.

The craft room was the cousin’s workshop and he made some good shit, including the bong out of materials she was using to make table lamps or something. He hid it in the drop ceiling, where he also hid all his dirty dishes.

Unexpectedly, my Aunt started raiding the ceiling one day, and his dirty dishes pushed her to check every inch of the place. That was how she found the bong, dirty dish breadcrumbs. Incredible.

She also loudly proclaimed on multiple occasions that my cousin’s ADHD was because he ate lead paint chips, and another time she told all her friends at our kitchen table that she heard him going to town in the upstairs shower. Take this perfectly fucked up childhood, drop it in an old mill town in the middle of nowhere, and you get my cousin.

Oh, my cousin. Hey, did you know the inside of a Stretch Armstrong was sugary sweet and edible? I learned this by watching my cousin go bananas eating the inside of his. He loved putting weird shit in his mouth. Another time I saw him take the charcoaled wood out of the cool woodstove and chew on it, gleefully laughing and intentionally drooling black slime.

He still puts weird shit in his mouth, but instead of toy guts, it’s food. He will cook anything together in a pot and would often make these pots of slop, even though they could be too much, even for him.

“Yo, cuz, this is disgusting. You want some?”

No thanks, dude, no thanks.

All of what I have described is kind of quirky, not so serious, and just kind of funny. So, is calling him “weird” and “strange” too much? Well, that depends on how you feel about the use of human waste as a tool for vandalism.

My cousin has shit on multiple people’s front lawn. He also shit on the skylight of some rich family’s Summer home near the local lake. He loves shitting as revenge and as an act against the perceived system.

While my cousin may take spite shits on people’s land and possessions, his urine is another story. You see, to shit is to be angry, to piss is to be mischievous.

When my cuz gets a couple of beers in him, he almost loses control of his bladder. He has pissed himself at multiple parties, including one time where he said he “forgot how to open his pants”. He also peed all over multiple gas station bathrooms over the years, including the one off the local highway that stores its toilet paper in the same room as the can. He’s pissed on and in cars, houses, mailboxes, etc.

There is a single incident, however, that is permanently etched into my mind, and that was the time he went to the bathroom in a soap dispenser at a local pool hall.

I want to point out, nobody ever encouraged him; this was just his thing.

Anyway, we were slowly getting our stuff together, and a few of us went to the bar to grab a beer before leaving. Suddenly, my cousin comes whipping up to the bar.

“Yo, cuz, we gotta go.”

The second we were in the car, my cousin started laughing and between tears would inhale deeply just to say “I pissed in the soap dispenser”.

If you have ever wondered who pees everywhere or leaves upper deckers at your house party, I know a guy.

Stay crescent fresh