Charles T.

It was early spring when I returned to the Carolina Mountains from my obscure and incoherent decadence abroad in a strange and foreign land known as Los Angeles, California. I had just completed my program at The Los Angeles Film School (which is a whole different story) and decided to move closer to home after my mother passed away from a brain hemorrhage and my father had been diagnosed with what some doctor's referred to as Dementia and others called it Alzheimer's. There was no reason to go completely home, or madly insane, mainly because I had no where to go, because my mother had passed away too early from a brain aneurism and it had drove my father into depressed state of dementia and was placed in a nursing home for Alzheimer and dementia patients. Therefore, I returned to a resort area close to my hometown, just two hours away, deep in the Appalachian Mountains where I had lived during my seven year tenure in college where I majored in socializing, intoxication, obnoxiousness, female anatomy and learned a few things about history so that I could graduate. (That also is a completely different story) I had corresponded with a very small local weekly newspaper that hired me to cover special events and boring county government news, but when I arrived to start my job the owner of the newspaper had died and the spoiled children of said paper did not honor my promise of a job by the owner/editor of the small weekly paper. It had happened so suddenly in a span of a couple of weeks. I needed a job - and a drink; a double shot of Bacardi with a hint of Mountain Dew for flavor. So there I was, very educated, jobless, broke. I had my car, my liquor, my cigarettes, and my health. All I need was a job to pay some bills and visit my dad on my days off before the old fart completely forgot who I was and left me an orphaned young adult in a world full of self-pity, sex, alcohol and video games - which I had all of it, except the sex and video games, because I had sold the games for gas money, and the sex was, well, there wasn't any. Not for me. I fancied myself an unemployed journalist. I was a history major in college and had studied writing and producing at film school - which both of those were similar to journalism. History reports were basically writing about something that happened in the past, in an informative way to let the reader know what happened just like a story in a magazine or newspaper. At film school I listened while burned-out directors, producers, writers and cinema photographers talked about their days of glory and how to do this or that as I sat there and took notes for myself to read later as "the reader". To me it was all relevant. Therefore, living in a vacation / resort destination town in the Carolina Mountains, the high cost of living and limited journalism jobs forced me to look elsewhere in a maze of seasonal jobs which paid just enough to not get by on a wage considered unbelievable to all the rich who flooded this paradise of luxury vainness, foot powder odor and expensive closed-mindedness socialites who mingled very carefully amongst the poor, bearded native-mountain population. ... and here I am.