Hi. I’m Thor.  I’m a recovering irony addict. I’m a slimy little creature both online and off, or at least I was, and these are my confessions. 

I always liked to think that I was a Bugs Bunny type, but my personal history up to this point reads very Detective Harry Du Bois when you’re trying to make him a superstar cop in Disco Elysium. Imagining myself to be a comedy fueled self aware main character, but IRL a tragic and oblivious id free floating in a world with no control and not dealing with it well. When I was in my mid-twenties I used to play a cyclical game with myself in the drunk-sloppy-hours after bar close where I would walk the streets of my southern Missouri home town and see how many houses in a row I could visit and fling the mail into the dewing streets. Once the paranoia would set in, I’d realize there was a trail of mail leading directly to me, sprint a few streets over, calm down, adjust, renew my trek, get bored, and let rip fresh postal carnage all over again. Being with me on one such outing is my friend Tyler’s favorite story to tell about me. He loves seeing the same horror and disgust in the listener’s face that HE once had when I told him he “HAD to turn around” and, while elbow deep in mail box guts, shouted, “who put all this MAIL in here.”

*actual photo of me if I stayed the same for the next twenty years

Also In my twenties I paid a stranger a hundred dollars to take my friend’s shift at a pizza joint so I would have a witness to me blowing the money from my dad’s life insurance in one pathetic night of glorious excess. I was enthralled by sazeracs at the time. I thought the act of throwing away liquor was the HEIGHT of decadence – though the following week straight of MDMA would beg to differ– The night though actually ended rather pathetically. Drinking until you black out is always sad. How do you even know if it was worth the money? Other people can recount your epic triumphs, but that’s all for their amusement, what about me? I’m trying to kill loneliness with hyper-stylized ultra farce with a key demo of myself over here.

Once I went to my buddy’s twenty-third birthday party with negative thirty dollars in my bank account. I couldn’t accept an evening without the promise of at least a brown out, so I devised a delightful scam where I cut up construction paper to look like strips of blotter (we’ll leave it at that, if you know you know), dropped it into the my final eighth of a bottle of tequila, and offered up shots to party-goers in exchange for beers or swigs of liquor. Yes I placebo MKUltra’d my friends and acquaintances because I was a “broke ass” The stunt had the knock-on effect of entertainment for the night as guests, pupils completely normal, returned to me raving about how awesome I was and all the fun things they were seeing in the ceiling tiles. 

I’m also a pseudo intellectual, an expert in everything that I think I even vaguely understand. I AM DUNNING KRUEGER. I assume Dunning Krueger is the guy who had the most Dunning Krueger effect, like Lou Gherig.  I always loved politics. The application of power through strategy scratches my little permanently adolescent gamer brain. As a corollary, I also love a nice romp into econ and history.  Unluckily not any of that had translated into personal success, because for the most part, I’ve always harnessed it into being insufferable to people online. Luckily–It’s always been weaponized against some of the most equally insufferable bigots and uncharitable fucks on the planet…mostly. You know—transphobes and people who say “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”… It’s always been such a violent transgression to me that people love the free market, tell me I need to learn about it, and don’t understand the concept of a fucking ROI. 

After I had dropped out of college to really focus on being a shithead I started working with my buddies in restaurants. Food is a passion of mine, anyone who’d seen my dumpy visage in 2016 would know that, but–like so many of my professional prospects–I never consummated our relationship. While my friends had certificates and culinary degrees I merely had self-taught knife skills and scarred hands. I was always first hired as a dishwasher with part-time salad duty. The joke would be on them though, because while my friends would get fired over various– highly avoidable–foibles, I would work my way up all the while skimming ingredients off the top to bring home and experiment with. My culinary career never really went much of anywhere though, an unfortunate accident with a tackling dummy and a separate incident of loaning my boss money to “keep the lights on” — keeping the lights on being a secret code he had for “get very zooted on coke”— really poisoned the well.

I’m never going to say full throat that I’m proud of my past. I’m proud of what I’ve done to overcome everything that stood in my way, including myself, but–mostly–I’m proud I made it out alive. Some of the people I knew didn’t. And I’m now removed enough from the underlying  sadness that fueled most of my angst that I’ve managed to still identify with the things about me back then that were true and honest, and laugh off the disquieting bits. I can recognize now that I would not have liked myself, but I do love myself, because I know what all that kid was going through. Now that I’m out of the woods I can say that a lot of it WAS pretty goddamned funny. In that my youth was a great success.

I was already on the road to redemption when I met my beautiful love Cara. I had quit smoking, drinking, drugs, and any type of fun. Shock therapy but it doesn’t get you booted from the Vice Presidency. –Jesus, if I kept drinking I probably could have been president– I had gotten in the gym, made amends with people, found a new job, and moved to Saint Louis to get away from the old me. I was playing the field on “dating” apps while I looked for places to rent. She loves telling absolutely everyone that she had swiped left on me three times before relenting–thanks algorithm–and I couldn’t blame her. I came from the factory pre-wrapped in so much caustic sarcasm I was melting my way through the floor–At one point on Tinder all of my pictures were of the Mucinex mascot and my bio just said that my turn offs were the Noid– I had taken a step back slightly from the nihilist irony cliff by then, but I was still lucky she even saw a human being when she looked at me through her phone. I was even luckier that she believed me that not having a bed was temporary rather than my natural state. 

She’s a Swiftie and a Disney adult, both things that probably would have made my former self roll my eyes so hard that they’d risk breaking the surly bonds of my head, but she had taken a chance on me and I owed it to both of us to do the same. Early in our relationship we actually went to Disney World. Watching this woman unembarrassed and earnestly engaging with the joy in her life really opened me up to realize that just because I was off-putting didn’t mean I was authentic. I owe the courage I have to get back into writing, go back to school, and invest in my life to her. I knew I loved her on that gondola ride back from Epcot, and I hesitantly challenged fate to make me regret anything more than not telling her right then and there. 

She shared with me a dream she had nurtured over COVID. She wanted to rebuild a bus into a home and take her life on the road. As buttoned up as I’ve tried to become I still fuck’n love a good time. I’ve never been more in on anything in my life. For months we watched video after video from people already doing what was just a hope for us. Years went by, our plans were refined and by May of 2024 we were ready. I had salvaged my credit and we had scrounged a savings together that would be a down payment on a truck and a trailer we could pull behind it.

As I write this right now we’re sitting at a custom desk we built and bolted to the wall, parked safely in the stony lap of the Santa Cruz mountains, the peaks separating us from the San Francisco Bay. We made our way out here from the ‘Lou to visit my brother for the first time since he moved here to become a father four years ago 

I tell you all this because ALL of this is what GabaGhoulBlog is about. It’s about travel,  stories, dreams, food, movies, sometimes politics, probably a really long essay about the Sopranos, and musings. All from the perspective of one reformed dirtbag.