I got back into therapy friday before last.

My history with therapy has been really rough.

Over a period of 5 years seeking therapy, my first three therapists didn't do shit for me.

#1: threatened to call the cops on me preemptively before she told me she was declining me within 30 min of the session. I never so much as raised my voice, let alone did anything threatening or disrespectful. Gave me a list of referrals that wouldn't take me and ghosted me unethically.

#2: Had to be forced by my insurance to take me. Kept me during the pandemic and then dumped me to a referral claiming I could get EMDR from a different therapist, even though she was certified to do it. New therapist never gave me a single session of EMDR.

#3: Was referred to give me EMDR. First tried to dump me by moving out of state, then set an appointment for my trauma date and cancelled at the last minute. Tried to have me hospitalized and referred me to Lakeside when I didn't "get the hint" she was trying to unethically abandon me. Eventually I got her to give me a referral to an office based therapist.

#4 (current) Former fucking prison guard. Talked about having my head xrayed for brain damage on the first session. First therapist that seemed to know what to do when I dissociated in session. Is supposed to be therapy only, but told me the second session would be in a new location that appears to be psychiatry (drugs) based.

Doing my second visit with 4 friday, and between last session and this one of the other people who was "there" got hospitalized and had to do a fundraiser. I'm worried he's just gonna waste my time slow walking me to a hospitalization knowing I have a 7k$ deductible and would be better off going to actual fucking jail for the weekend on a criminal charge.

It's bad, the whole thing is bad. I'm wired tight as fuck not knowing how it's gonna go. Like, physical symptoms, can't sleep more than 4 hours a night, and that in shifts, can't hold down food. It's bad.

I know I'm gonna lose the ability to be verbal, and I'm getting worse at a rapid pace as the anniversary date approaches.

Did 3 shows in the past three weeks, somehow, so I'm still gigging and working my day job and all that.

But fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. There was JUST a mass shooting in my state, and they are gonna crack down on the crazies, ie, me.

Anniversay date is a month and a half away, and mentally I'm already gone, and it's gonna get a lot worse. Over the past 6 years from 5-12-2017 I get worse for two months before, and stay fucked up for 2 months after (4 months total).

Shit is bad bad bad.

Got a musical festival I want to go to this weekend.

Hopefully I'll stay outside and be able to go to it.

So the guy who did the Negro Terror documentary showed up to my show with Stay Fashionable last night and filmed us, included @sweat_rockers and Little Baby Tendencies at the Hi-Tone small room.

Am I gonna be in a documentary about local memphis female fronted bands? I dunno. Maybe. Every band in the lineup had a female lead.

I'm apparently still severely mentally ill, and I become more aware of it the more I recover.

I have seen so much fucked up shit. Playing shows totally sets off my PTSD. Keep in mind the trauma that sent me to therapy happened at a show. yet somehow I've consistently played shows, even during the pandemic, the entire time since.

Having super bad anhedonia and dissociation. I'm basically halfway there during a show, using all my energy to rest and hold still, which seems like a paradox. Like going to the bathroom and just shaking after I get set up. It's a lot of pressure, performing for a crowd when you haven't really practiced in a month, being permanently recorded, just playing shows every week or two, doing all your playing on stage.

Like, how crazy do I sound talking about this stuff? I work a boring ass office job all day, then I play a show that's shockingly well attended for a wednesday night during a fucking thunderstorm.

And what do I do? I give the touring band a sack of mushrooms after the show.

Bruh, I am a 41 year old morbidly obese man, getter balder everyday with a corkscrew of hair for a combover wearing a japanese FMW Leather Face Tony Myers shirt based off a Super Mario 3 logo.

At what point does it become so ridiculous even I don't believe myself? I wouldn't believe myself if I met me.

But there's pictures. There's video. Factually, I KNOW it happened.

The sticker on that bass drum is the inverse of the tattoo on my chest, and also my first album cover, and there's John Rash's camera.

I'm thinking about going back into therapy next month, but definitely well before 5-12.

What am I gonna tell the guy?

"Hi, I'm FUNKbrs, and the past 3 therapists I've had have dumped me for being too crazy, 2 of which tried to have me hospitalized and the other one wanted me medicated before even bringing up hospitalization, you're #4 and I need you to tell me I'm fine and nothing was ever wrong with me despite my ridiculous trauma history"

But like, I'M NOT HERE. Like the whole show I'm just watching my hands play all the songs on autopilot. Hard shit. Technical shit. Some part of my brain is doing it, and its not the part that uses my eyes. I couldn't even list off the names of all the songs if you paid me $20, but I can play them all well enough for a dude to want to film it for a documentary about music.

Like for real, the guy who used to live in this head DIED 5 and a half years ago, and I just kinda woke up in his life. I won't recognize people I've known for YEARS in a crowd. It's all just a narrative. I have all these terrible memories but they can't all be true. Nobody could be that fucked up. I'll have a flashback and a whole period of several years, like a whole band I was in, recorded with, and played shows with, that I'd completely forgotten about.

The band Who Shot John? for example. I don't remember ANY of that, but yet I recorded lead vocal of that band with a song I wrote. Like, it's posted on NG.

I don't know, this is a long ramble I guess. You're the one reading my newspost, so I guess you're the weird one for reading it, not me. I lived it. I'm allowed to write about it.

Fuck man I smell blood and kerosene.

There's no reason for me to be this out of it. The anniversary won't be for MONTHS.

But the show went well, fuck.

I better shut up before I say something dumb.

Spotify – Stay Fashionable EP

Am I famous now? I feel famous.

Fame is when you get to eat bicuits with neckbone gravy for breakfast, right?

Because that's the life I'm living now.

I have no idea who took this video, but this time it wasn't my girlfriend, I promise.

Wait for 2:54 to see one of my infamous "walk arounds" were I literally play a solo while walking around the kit. I also used the forbidden technique called a "bodhran roll" where I play one handed with both sides of the stick.

Or don't, I don't know. Life is confusing and Jerry Lee Lewis didn't die, even though everyone thinks he died forever ago.

Mangos are tasty.

I played two shows last weekend, but I only uploaded video from one of them.

This is my band Stay Fashionable performing the original song "I understand."

Also, my uncle died yesterday.

It's a solo acoustic version of this song I did like a decade ago:

I am not a hollow shell of a man trying to relive the old days that were objectively bad and only seem good through the lens of nostalgia.

I sing back up vocals on this song.

This is my band Stay Fashionable playing at the Peterson Compound in Millington TN on 7-16-2022

I am very cool and hip and not at all old or insane. Many individual people like me, some even in groups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waH7pvEIgD4

Shit's going all screwy.

Angelo Trussel, the drummer for Walking on Landmines, is moving to Minnesota. He's a great drummer. However, if he's not going to be around, the next first choice who's interested is... me. Shelby, the guitarist for WOL, has a record label called Emotions False records who record in Sun Studios (yes, THAT Sun Studios. It's actually not that expensive to record there). The vocalist Gabriela is apparently super excited I'll be in the band, and I might start brewing hooch again since everyone in that band drinks.

I've already decided to join and had my first practice in this band, and it went well. In the process of courting the opportunity, I also got my other band, Stay Fashionable a gig with WOL while Angelo is still in town. I know it's a stereo type for drummers to be in tons of bands... yeah, it's a stereotype for a reason. With covid restrictions falling and Shelby just living down the street from me, it only makes sense that I'd join his band. So yeah, SF has a gig 4-9 at RockHouse on Raleigh LaGrange in Memphis as well.

That's a lot of music news considering the buried headline on this post, about my experience attending Fool's Ball.

Fool's Ball/Fall Ball are biannual events that happen in north mississippi run by a family of Dead Heads that's been doing it for 20 years. Mark and Donna Christiansen celebrated their anniversary one year by inviting all their musician friends over and getting extremely fucked up off as many substances they could get their hands on. I'm not trying to dry snitch, but I think you'll get my point here.

So me and Jana are camping in our deluxe giant tarp tent bungalo I rigged up using penny tie outs and a massive 20 by 50 tarps tied between my car and two trees. So the first night this dude named DooDoo shows up, screaming about how he's a water sign and he's looking for a female fire sign and he's carrying around this big stick screaming at the top of his lungs. Apparently this dude is tweaking his absolute nuts off on M E DOUBLE F. He keeps screaming that his name's "DOO DOO" and "DON'T STEP IN ME!!!" He keeps screaming the gamer word even though everyone around is pale as the driven snow. dd It's 40 degrees and this dude is running around with his shirt off, gets into some kinda fight with some dudes, and ultimately gets run off later in the night after screaming for like half an hour.

Well we all wake up the next morning, and this dude is still up, tweaking his fucking tits off, trying to climb trees, screaming at God, trying to talk about religion. He's trying to steal coals from fires to get a fire started. He gets a bud light bottle and wraps a hose around it; he later says it's a symbol of his father's love. He comes to chill in my camp a little bit and I humor him, and he starts talking about the Aryan BrotherHood and talking about how he's dutch, english, and Irish, which, last time I checked, makes him a fucking mutt.

I mean this guy is methed out of his motherfucking mind, which isn't actually a common thing at the Ball. Normally people go there to trip and chill and be all groovy peace and love and shit. I roll him a j to try to chill him out, but he only smokes a few puffs. I always take that as a bad sign someone's a serious meth head if weed can't chill out their tweakery. You can always tell the bad tweakers when they don't even like weed because it harshes their tweak. Dude keeps saying crazy shit about religion and tries to introduce me to Jesus and shit, real fucking psychotic shit. I humor him because fuck, it's the Ball, I expect people to be fucked up here. Dude was farting and barking like a dog, doing a really convincing retard impression, all kinds of wild shit.

I'm chillin, just boiling some coffee and trying to heat up some red beans and rice with sausage I'd cooked the night before.

So old DooDoo wanders off, and the dudes he was screaming at recognized him, and they start fighting. This whacko had been carrying around a giant stump all night. So this DooDoo piece of shit and these two guys start beating the dog shit out of eat other with fucking hunks of firewood, everybody's fucking bleeding, it's a real mess.

So this whitesupremacist tweaker fuck gets thrown out by security, and starts telling all these lies about how he's got to pack his tent and leave in his truck, me knowing full fucking well he was begging for a ride down the street to pick up his tent to me less than an hour ago. Well he hims and haws and runs his fucking mouth until they threaten to zip tie him and drag him out. He balls up his tent and takes it towards the stage...... towards a truck that doesn't exist. And the owners of the tent. Those were all just made up psychotic lies he told to delay getting thrown out, after spending all night claiming he was fucking security, picking fights and trying to throw other people out.

So now it's his last stand, and Dookey dipshit made one very large mistake.

The Ball is run by the Dixie Mob.

And the Dixie Mob's enforce is AwGo Fucking WHAT.

That is his name.

Awgo. What.

Awgo what you say? AW GO FUCK YOURSELF.

He's.... he's a formally diagnosed diassociative system, gets a crazy check, the whole nine. Infamously "treats" his PTSD with vast quantities of LSD, and uses meditative exercise for hours on end doing push ups, sit ups, pull ups, and balancing on ropes and juggling axes for fun. The man is an absolute maniac. Old bouncer at every decent club in Memphis, the guy used to do headstand push ups while getting tazed for kicks. The cops are scare shitless of him, and he regularly runs for elected office just to piss off the government. Dude is... not to be fucked with. Built like a brick shit house.

Like, when I got my head scar, at the Rally Point, Awgo was the security guard there.

So Awgo beats the absolute dog shit out of this guy. Awgo has a dixie flag with gay pride colors tattooed on his neck. He does not play any kind of nazi shit. He personally defaced the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue before it was removed. It's not so much that he loves civil rights so much as he hates fucking nazis and loves hippie shit.

Now this righteous mother fucker Awgo kicks 9 kinds of shit out of this piece of shit DooDoo, they zip tie him up like a trussed hog, toss him in the bed of a truck and toss him in the nearest ditch. Later some cops showed up and the dudes he assaulted probably pressed charges.

Oh, and a guy jumped off an overpass on video yesterday in Memphis.

So yeah, I'm doing fucking great. Totally stable. Nothing triggering me at all right now. Not dissociated AT ALL. Nah, a sleepless weekend camping in the cold as fuck eating funny chocolates and tasting tiny stamps while witnessing a violent assault by a tweaked out whitesupremacist didn't set me off at ALL.

I mean, especially not with 5-12 just a little over a month away. Gosh, that event didn't involve any crazy violent assholes.

Yeah, but musically, shit's going great.