Here are the notes from my halloween movie episode. you can listen here

The Crow – a classic, Eric Draven returns from the dead a year after his death to exact revenge on the folks who killed him and his fiancee. takes place in some dark future or past, he’s watched over by a crow, hence the namesake. 

Rosemarys Baby – Happy family move into a beautiful pre war apartment and the husband sells out his pregnant wife to a devil worshiping cult. will the book keeper save her? watch to find out. 

Flowers in the Attic – hear me out on this one. it’s not a typical horror plot, but imagine losing your father and your normal middle class life to go move into a new england estate and be boarded into a single room with a stairwell to the attic? your mother stops coming to visit and your estranged grandmother is slowing poisoning you. Add in some old school protestant values and wasp ways of the old north east. Nightmares are welcomed when living in an unbearable hell. 

Open Water 2 – imagine, and maybe because i’m afraid of open bodies of water and sharks, having a splendid time on a luxury yacht with some great friends and then being unable to get back on the boat because none of you remembered to lower the ladder. and one of ya’ll have your period, and sharks can smell blood miles away. 

The Others – two small children apparently allergic to the sunlight living in a midivil manor on some long forgotten estate with a crazy mother who paces around waiting for her husband to return home from war. The boy keeps seeing people who aren’t really there. Mother thinks he’s crazy, girl thinks he’s imagining things and just trying to scare her. 

Ghost Ship – in 1962 a passenger ship goes missing. when a salvage ship discovers it years later on the high seas they realize the inhabitants might still be on the ship. just not in the flesh. the first 10 minutes are the best 10 minutes of gruesome movie watching. 

The Gate – parents go away for the weekend and the kids and one neighbor friend find a hole in the back yard that opens up a pure hell inside their home. This movie created a recurring nightmare i had for years. if i only thought about it during the day i would have the same nightmare. it’s the only nightmare i’ve ever had. being a lackey kid i guess i related. 

Hereditary – dark secrets are revealed after the matriarch passes away. this movie is so detailed and deep to explain. every movie minute leads to another. death and hauntings and tragedy follow this grieving family. 

The Wicker Man – (06 version) a girl goes missing in a small town, when a police officer comes to the town to investigate after receiving an anonymous letter he’s told the girl never existed. the movie unravels piece by piece. after being on the small town island he starts to realize the rules of the land are not what they seem and maybe she met her death in  a ritualistic manner. Then he finds his own fate might be in jeopardy. the 1973 version is pretty gory if you want classic 

The Blair Witch Project – when this movie came out people were puking and running out of the theater. in 1999 people thought this was real, low budget and a great PR firm made it seem like these were really lost tapes of some real witch hunt. it’s cult status because heather, in all her fear gave a dying message to her friends and family. While searching for some local legend they get lost in the woods and end up at their demise. 

There you go. it’s not a typical halloween list, it’s a psychological thriller list. enjoy

Another mass shooting in America. This is now part of our culture. Second rate countries are warning their citizens of the dangers in America. America used to be a global destination, now, we have the ratings of a middle eastern town. White terrorists are everywhere.

After September 11 the news all across this country was brown folks are out to kill us. that home grown terrorists were coming to America to kill us and our way of life. Thanks to law enforcement that never came to be. We got past it and thrived as a country. Then Donald Trump became President.

White supremacy started to show its ugly face, racism started to become vocal. This is nothing new in this country. it’s always been there. it’s part of our social pattern. But in the past we had leaders who would condemn such behavior. We as a society would treat those people as outsiders.

Thanks to Fox News, [sic] uneducated folks all over this country blame brown folks for their misgivings. 680 jobs just opened up in Mississippi, foster a child while you’re there. It’s not brown or black or Asian people who have led us to where we are at, it’s the people in leadership who have led us to where we are. Corporations pay our politicians and our voices are muted.

Get money out of politics and they have no one to answer to but the very people they were elected to serve. It’s that simple. Push out the special interests out of Washington DC and it’ll become the dust town it was meant to be. Politicians weren’t meant to live in DC. Our system runs on corporate money which sits inside DC and so do our local elected representatives.

Democracy continues to take a backseat to this current administration, the gop does nothing. To be a republican in todays affairs is un-American. You can’t be a racist and be american, you can’t be for kids in cages, and be american, you can’t hate immigration, and be american.

The world waits for the American elections in 2020. So does the majority of its citizens. America longs to be the front for democracy, voting out an angry racist with money would signal to the world, we’re done with con-men.

Can I get people to vote? Can I get a country that represents the people? All the people.

Over the last year I’ve been writing and producing a podcast called paul now podcast, the original idea was to talk about the gay culture in DFW but that seems to fizzle out once Pride is over, as it does in most cities. So about four months ago I revamped my direction and decided to just talk about my experience living in Dallas, from the experience of a northeastern.

It’s not that gay culture is small here in DFW, it’s pretty large. It comes in all sizes and shapes, colors, positions. Whatever your taste is this place has it. Leather, bears, otters, military, twinks, you’ll find it here, and for the most part, it’s a very welcoming community.

But what is there to say on a weekly basis about a community that thrives when left to its own? The gay community lives akin to the rest of the human community. We want the same things as everyone. Seems self indulgent to talk about our community in a beer goggle fashion as if it’s the only one that matters. So I didn’t know where I wanted to take the podcast, I was either going to expand it or internalize it.

I chose to internalize it and make it all about me, and the city I’m in of course, and with that decision I changed the format and started to talk about my own experience living in this super red state. This city is largely blue. My progressive thoughts and options are often taken as silly to the people I tell. I get called a socialist and uneducated.

The educational institution I went to ranks 18 in the world. There are no Texas schools close to that. If my cares are for the people who have less than me, then I guess I’m a socialist. People like me are called humanitarians where I come from. This is something I have become more and more proud of as I watch this country become more greedy and deceitful.

I have been given many advances in this world. I hold a privilege I did’t ask for, and because of this I feel it’s my responsibility to hold myself in a manner that shows respect and empathy for everyone. This is something that’s been ingrained in me from my parents, my church and my community.

Theres a beauty in being humble. To me it’s a sense of feeling content with what I have. I try to balance a life of want and need and it’s hard at times. I am drawn to brighter and bigger things all the time. As I age I find restraint easier but the thrill of something new always haunts me. This is something I’ll have to comprise with living in the capitalist country I’m in.

Can we look around at the state of this union for a minute? This country is a total mess. We have criminals running the highest office in the land. If we don’t take a stand we will lose the fabric of what America was built on. The forefathers didn’t think about mass shooters or uneducated people when they wrote up our destiny. We have a free press for this reason.They didn’t have weapons of mass casualties when it was written.We need new people in Congress. We need people who have been living in America. Washington is a bubble of corporate money and nothing will change if we continue to follow these people like they are royalty. They are not. They live by the same rule of law. They seem to live above it lately and we need to change that. The fish rots from the head down. We see it changing, the fabric is fading. We can not have eight years of this.

I’m thinking the book will be done by the end of summer. it’s taken a lot of sweat and stress to find the right stories to put in it since they are pretty intimate and very personal. But it’s what I’m choosing to do so I wanted to be honest in the stories I tell. The book starts with a 16 year old me figuring out his sexuality while still trying to exist in his current life. it was messy. and the choices he made were not always right.

A Random Night in Scranton Pennsylvania

One evening during the summer of 2002 or 2003 I was hanging out with my friend Suzy and we were trying to go out, meanwhile, it was probably a Tuesday, but we were twenty something and worked 2nd shift so endless nights were kind of a thing. Many many nights we would close down bars. She is also beautiful and was a huge flirt and would get free drinks and invites to after parties, which I always tagged along to. So here we are in Scranton Pennsylvania, way before The Office was ever a thing, trying to make plans. She suggested I call our other friend Gina. Gina was the second funniest person I’ve ever met, first one being a boy from my high school, he’s definitely another story for another day. So I call Gina and ask what’s she’s up to. She was at the Banshee, an Irish bar downtown. She was with her friends from high school, who I have met over the years and didn’t like one bit. They went to an uppity Catholic school and were a total bore to hang out with. So I told Suzy and we agreed we’d have a drink and find something else to do.

As predicted I was bored out of my fucking mind five minutes into sitting at their table. Did i mention there were live bagpipers on the stage? Did I also mention I was high on cocaine? If you’ve never experienced these two things together, in a tiny bar, I do not suggest it. After texting everyone I knew to get a new plan together failed, I started to slam drinks. And slam drinks. I’m pretty sure I did a couple Irish car bombs, when in an Irish bar, right?, and before I knew it, it’s two o’clock and they are calling last call. At this point I’m blitz and ready to party. I want more liquor and I want more drugs but it looked dismal. So we get into the car, I know, I know, I just told you how drunk I was. So anyway, we are in the car and across from the bar was a Howard Johnson. I saw a bunch of young people on the balcony of the second floor so I asked the girls, Gina is now with us as her friends left, if they want to check it out. They didn’t. I wasn’t really asking them so off I was to the staircase. The staircases are outside as are the hallways, back then I’m pretty a room was thirty dollars a night if you can picture it. So I start chatting with the three people outside smoking and get friendly enough with them go into one of the rooms. There were probably about 15-20 people. They were clearly drunk. I made my way to the back of the room where the bathroom was and grabbed a beer from the tub.

Most of the people didn’t speak English and the ones who did had thick accents. They were on an American tour of colleges or something, I can’t really remember now. I start pounding beers and am getting chatty and horny and notice these two blonde guys outside smoking so I take a cigarette out of my pack and go outside. I pretended to look for a lighter, something I often did if I wanted to talk with someone. I looked over at them and asked if one had a light. After the cigarette was lit I tried to chat with them but their english was really spotty and I was too drunk to listen carefully. I did find out they were from Russia and that they were staying in the room next door. One of them said he was going in to piss. After some time his friend said he was going to check on him. About thirty seconds later he opened the door and asked me if I wanted to come in.

When I walked in the first guy who walked in was laying naked face down on the bed. I followed the second guy into the room and we started kissing. We took off our clothes. He was pale and skinny and smelled of body odor. It was overpowering my desire but I didn’t stop. This was like porno the way this all started. He kneeled down and started to suck my dick. I looked over at the other guy who had flipped over and was jacking off while watching us. I walked over to the bed and bend down to start kissing him. He was pale and skinny as well but I found him more attractive. His face was softer looking. He had more color in his cheeks. I started to kiss his neck and made my way down to his dick and started sucking on it. the other guy came over to the bed and started kissing my body. Then he got into the doggy position with his ass facing me, so I got in back of him, spit on my dick and started fucking him. The other guy started jacking off again and I just kept my eyes on him while I fucked his friend. At some point we were missionary and the cute one flipped back over on to his stomach which I took as an invite so I got on time of him and started fucking him. His skin was so soft and with just the perfect amount of fat under the skin. The other guy got up off the bed and sat in a chair facing us and started jacking off.

I’m not sure how long we were fucking but it must have been awhile because when i looked over at chair guy he was passed out. His big dick soft and thick. I looked down at my crush to see he too is passed out. I wasn’t sure what to do at that point, do I stop? Do I pretend to cum? Every possibility seems rude at the moment. I rolled over off the guy and laid on the bed for a minute before I was like fuck it, I put my clothes on drank the rest of the beer in my can and left.

When I walked out and birds were chirping and remembered Gina and Suzy. But that thought faded because i was fucking beat and just wanted my bed. So I jump into my car and Suzy is passed out in the front seat and Gina is passed out in the back. We all crashed at my apartment that night.