For The Book!

Predators and Scammers a memoir by Brian vonAhsen   Chapter One The Master Manipulator Though the masters make the rules For the wise men and the fools I got nothin', Ma, to live up to ------ Bob Dylan -------------------------------------- Anywhere but Here I remember my mother once said to me, “Brian, you are a people [...]

Perhaps it's a mistake to try and "wrap up" any of... This. This journey, this road, this series of adventures, encounters and decisions. This account of this part of my life. A time of life rife with distractions, toxins, motivations, maneuvers... magical moments, first times, fucked up times, times of unimaginable fright, times to unavoidably [...]

I went to sleep last night hoping to recall at least a few details about how this entire adventure ended, or even to get a better grasp on when it ended. I did not. So in today's post, I'm going to simply write of anything I can remember. Anything at all I can manage to [...]

My adult self is more than a bit incredulous that I could have made such a stupid decision. How could I have gone and put all that powder up my nose? Even if it HAD been cocaine and not the far more dangerous PCP that it was... a shitload of cocaine up my nose was [...]

... when I make what my adult self would have to say was one of the worst decisions of the entire “adventure” thus far. The worst decision of my life. ------------------------------------------ My adult self knows exactly why I have almost no memory of that afternoon. That afternoon, evening... all the way til the next morning. [...]

My adult self looks online for something to jog the messed-up morass of this memory, and what I find helps very little. I find reviews of the show, I watch a poorly done documentary film on YouTube about it. I read the Wikipedia entry about "The Godfather of Shock Rock" and where Alice Cooper was [...]

Fortunately, I made it through that gauntlet of pushing bodies without injury. Fortunately, most of that crushing crowd made it into the Omaha Civic Auditorium relatively unscathed as well. Well enough... as far as I know. I do know that no one died, but it could easily have been otherwise. Just ten months later in [...]

The doors should have been opened by now. I have no sense of how long I've been standing here, but it's been hours. It's been hours since I could keep from being jostled by the ever growing crowd in front of the arena. It's in situations likes these when being taller than most people really [...]

The memory of what happened before, now comes back to me. --------------------------------------- Ha! My adult self this morning contemplates various mental processes. This thing called memory goes through me in ways which easily elude. Capturing lucidity is a luxury. As I attempt to recount these events, they come in snippets. Out of sorted scenes, shown [...]

I'm standing at the top of the stairs. The top of the stairs at Maria's two bedroom apartment above the one with the bloodstain. I'm looking down at Fred at the bottom of the stairs. "Get the FUCK OUT Fred!!" "Get the fuck out and NEVER come back!" I really don't know how I got [...]